From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, July 12
Al Jazeera — read the full story
A briefing came in Tuesday morning about a Trump relative trying to knit Libya's factions back together with oil promises. Al Jazeera reports that Massad Boulos is offering investment deals to the rival camps if they'll agree on a unified government. The underlying wager: that money can suture what politics can't—though there's a sharper question buried in it about whether you can buy stability into a system already corrupted by its own price. Hildegard speaks first on this, then Seneca.
When I fought Abbot Kuno for our freedom at Rupertsberg, I understood that fractured powers do not heal by being paid. This Libya plan—offering oil to rival factions in exchange for unity—confuses sedation with medicine.
The waters must be compressed by proper fire, or they flow unseemly; here they are simply given permission to keep their divisions while taking the money. Real healing requires what I knew as penitentia—actual change in the soul of the fractured thing.
I told Barbarossa his antipopes did not mend the Church's schism, only deepened it. This is the same corruption wearing the mask of diplomacy.
The factions will remain fractured; the money will simply make their fracture profitable.
of which the pavement had much oil flowing from it. But nevertheless the wind from the north, coming at times, stirred up the balsam and that oil. Then many people came into the same building, who were sprinkled with that oil and were signed on their foreheads with that balsam. A…
Of God. How? Because the most profound and chief *sapientia* has been placed by the grace of God in the mouth of human rationality, so that man may exercise the office of magisterium in the name of God, through the strictness of justice and the mercy of the same Most High. Which,…
of the firmament under the earth coagulates, and through its heat it is dissolved. For the heat of the sun and the moisture from the waters in the clouds thus join and mix together, so that through these all fruit on earth is ruled and strengthened, because the heat of the sun an…
the iotum governs and sustains itself and is windy, just as the four principal winds with their collateral winds hold the entire firmament in position, so that each of them assists the others for the strengthening of the firmament. This signifies that the soul flies in man with f…
the middle one, with its purity and sweetness, soothes the things above and tempers the things below, nor does it produce plagues from itself, because if the individual elements were to strike the creatures, nothing would be able to help them, nor endure, nor subsist. Indeed, the…
I spent time in Corsica, exiled and watching civil conflict from the outside. When Rome tried to pacify a restless region, we sent two things: soldiers and wealth. The wealth was supposed to create a common interest. Sometimes it worked.
Usually it just created a second conflict — now the factions fought over control of the money itself. The underlying war, the one about power, never stopped; it just had a new prize pool attached to it. This plan in Libya does the same thing. Boulos is betting that if each faction gets a piece of the oil wealth, they'll have reason to cooperate.
But Libya's factions aren't fighting over scarcity of money. They're fighting over who gets to be Libya — who holds the state, who holds legitimacy. That's not solved by adding wealth to the table. It's solved by building a court so impartial, so stable, that both sides trust it more than they trust their weapons.
Without that trust, the oil money just becomes ammunition. The factions will take it, shift position, and resume the war you thought you'd papered over.
vessel? Who does not value a benevolent and faithful adviser? Who will not willingly receive a man who is ready to bear a share, as we may say, of the difficulty of his circumstances, and by this very act to ease the burden, by taking a part of it. THE ENCHEIRIDION, OR MANUAL. I.…
vessel? Who does not value a benevolent and faithful adviser? Who will not willingly receive a man who is ready to bear a share, as we may say, of the difficulty of his circumstances, and by this very act to ease the burden, by taking a part of it. THE ENCHEIRIDION, OR MANUAL. I.…
off the opportunities for which it seeks. XV. Would that we could indeed persuade men to receive back money which they have lent from those debtors only who are willing to pay! would that no agreement ever bound the buyer to the seller, and that their interests were not protected…
is an enormous mass of things without names, which we do not speak of under distinctive names of their own, but by the names of other things transferred to them. We speak of our own foot, of the foot of a couch, of a sail, or of a poem; we apply the word 'dog' to a hound, a fish,…
division of philosophy is made—into _Physics_, dealing with the universe and its laws, the problems of divine government and teleology; _Logic_, which trains the mind to discern true from false; and _Ethics_, which applies the knowledge thus gained and tested to practical life. T…
The story ran in Al Jazeera. Fractured systems mend by architecture, not by payment—a lesson that echoes from Rupertsberg to every modern attempt at managing splintered power. That's Old News for today.