Saint Columba is a man. I think it is necessary to say so because the name looks exactly like a Latin feminine form (first declension, don’t you know?) and I wouldn’t want to cause confusion. Columba, the patron saint of Derby, founded the famous abbey at Iona (OK, maybe it’s as famous as Columba but at least I never confused it with a woman) and is one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. So he, or she, had a knack for starting things. Including in his spare time… uh… sighting a monster. In Loch Ness.

No, really. That’s what it says. He moved to Scotland to found Iona and stayed there most of the rest of his life, dying at Iona at age 75 in 597. And during his mission to the Picts he found time on August 22 of 565 AD to have some sort of encounter with a monster some identify with the famous Loch Ness one.

Iona’s pretty far from anything, across a strait from the Isle of Mull. And that characterization might get me letters since two villages on Mull are called Calgary and Tobermory so I guess somebody from there settled Canada. (It’s not far enough from anything to stop Vikings from repeatedly attacking it during their attacking stuff heyday, starting in 794 or 795 AD and including massacring 68 monks in 806 AD which made many of their colleagues feel that Ireland had a healthier climate with fewer iron blades slicing through the bloody air right at you… or France… or Switzerland, you know, really really far from the North Sea.) And if you follow the “Great Glen Fault” northeast toward Inverness from Mull you will encounter the murky waters of Loch Ness. Since Loch Ness in turn contains more fresh water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined I guess there’s a lot of places for a bumpy serpent thingy to hide.

I also have to concede that sightings going back 1451 years suggest there might be something there. And I’m all for vigorous local traditions including kitchy tourist-related elaborations. But the fact that no one has ever really seen it, let alone a herd of same that might be reproducing, and mighty few individual animals live 1451 years, suggest that somebody was mistaken or making things up.

Not that anyone ever embroiders tales of missionaries in any way, of course. But presumably the monster he chased away from one of his disciples into the depths of the River Ness with the sign of the cross after it killed some Pict wasn’t the Loch Ness Monster that doesn’t live there today. (I also like the bit of the story where it killed some Pict, a sort of Star Trek redshirt of the Columba legend.)

By the way, I was sort of right about the name Columba means “dove” in Latin and is a translation of his Irish name Colm Cille or “church dove”, which we don’t know if it was his birth name or adopted. But it turns out Jonah in Hebrew is dove. So that all kind of makes sense.

Unlike spotting the Loch Ness Monster, in any language.

“Strive to be the greatest man in your country, and you may be disappointed. Strive to be the best and you may succeed: he may well win the race that runs by himself.” Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, quoted in The Patriot Post “Founder’s Quote Daily” February 6 2009

On this date in 1770, August 21, James Cook formally claimed Eastern Australia for Britain. It took long enough.

Maybe not from the point of view of aboriginal activists who, as elsewhere, point with some irritation to the notion of claiming a place somebody else already calls home. But the curious thing is that if Australia was a fish, a lot of people would have thrown it back. Indeed they did, including the Dutch, who did the nautical equivalent of stumbling across it in the early 17^th century and said the Dutch equivalent of phooey. And they weren’t shy about claiming, say, Indonesia or New York both of which had some drawbacks of their own.

Likewise, the British found it in 1688 and said “No thanks” or the unprintable nautical equivalent. Then Cook showed up, during a voyage whose purpose was to let astronomers view the transit of Venus (the planet not the naked goddess on a clam shell), and praised the lush ecology of Botany Bay.

I hope he was a better navigator than he was a biologist. Or that he knew it was propaganda. Because the British did then start sending convicts to start over in what was meant to be a fertile land but was actually a scrubby heap of sand and big fierce crocodiles. (And yes, inhabited. Evidently the first words spoken by an Australian aborigine to a European, on the first British colony ships, were “Warra warra” which means go away. They didn’t, even though the words were accompanied by waving a spear. Mind you Hawaiian natives did kill Cook in 1779 though as it turns out they cooked him but did not eat him, if it’s any consolation to anyone.) Not since Erik the Red came up with the name Greenland over a mug of frozen mead has PR so exaggerated the merits of a country for farming and settlement.

It got settled anyway. And I won’t repeat here what I have said elsewhere about the tragic collision of European culture and diseases with indigenous people in various parts of the world. But I will say that in Australia as elsewhere the aborigines were not living in Eden until white serpents showed up. And I will add, with Daniel Hannan in Inventing Freedom, that the Australia that the British founded did become one of the most prosperous and freest places on earth, and a key contributor to Allied victory in two world wars, because of distinctly English habits of self-government that, following the debacle of the American Revolution, were allowed to flourish in the antipodes. And the locals would not have been better off if the Imperial Japanese had been the first to show up and stay.

After visiting in 2004, Richard John Neuhaus wrote “In Australia it is said that they will not let their geography defeat their history.” And indeed they have not done badly at all for a place that seafaring colonizing nations appeared to be competing for the better part of two centuries to stick someone else with.

“In the mystery of the end, of course, man hurts not nor destroys in all the holy mountain, and lion lies down with lamb. But before the end, it cannot be, unless the lion becomes a docile bag of air that is no lion at all – a king of beasts with nothing fit for general resurrection but an empty skin: a mangy, risen rug unfit to grace the Supper of the Lamb. There is no way around the killing here that is not less than human in the end; man is what he is: hunter, butcher, carnivore; save him without that and you save nothing – manskins stuffed with sacred sawdust reach no New Jerusalem; the trip is not worth the baggage left behind. Raise him indeed, but raise him in the time of resurrection – and raise him Man – with flesh, bones and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature…. bring him home himself: with hands till pierced by grim exchanges, glorious scars; and with a heart still ready for astonishment at Lion and Lamb In their unimaginable concourse.” Robert Farrar Capon The Supper of the Lamb

Hi folks,

With 10 days to go, Brigitte and I are asking for your help to get her "Not Just for Kicks" project across the finish line. I know a lot of you have supported our bigger projects, for which we're very grateful. And we'll have another one in the spring that I hope you'll think is worthwhile. And a number of you are supporting us with monthly donations that are also much appreciated.

So now I'm asking people who enjoy our work but haven't yet backed it to put something into Brigitte's project. She's over 2/3 of the way to her $1,500 target to help her make a book and video about her and our daughter's journey to the WKC world karate championships in Dublin, Ireland, about the hard work, the sense of achievement and the victories over fatigue and fear. But we still need $400.

Can 80 people kick in $5 each in the next week and a half and make it happen?

Thanks.

[podcast title="News and Views with Rob Snow, August 19"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/August/RobSnow160819.mp3[/podcast]

On August 20 of 1308, Jacques de Molay was formally absolved of heresy by Pope Clement V. Which seems kind of nice given the tangled bad feelings between the Grand Master of the Knights Templar and the Roman Pontiff, who had dissolved his order a year earlier partly because Philip IV of France was deeply in debt to the Templars and naturally figured that if he could just, you know, grab all their cash he’d be a much richer if not necessarily a better man. Uh, except for the bit where Philip had de Molay burned for heresy anyway.

Did I mention that Philip’s nickname “the Fair” pertained to the colour of his hair not his moral conduct? (Yes, on July 31.) He was also called “the Iron king” though in this case “the red hot Iron king" might have been more appropriate. He did not have de Molay burned all at once and not instantly, to be sure. He had him tortured in 1307, along with many other Templars, as a result of which they confessed to whatever to make it stop, giving Clement the rationale to dissolve the order and Philip to dissolve their bank accounts.

After that things get a bit obscure as well as bloody. Apparently the Pope and the King agreed to split the court proceedings that resulted from De Molay recanting his forced confession. And during the subsequent investigation into the crucial question whether the Templars denied Christ and Philip could get all their money, the king had 54 of them burnt at the stake in 1310.

De Molay and a few others were kept in a mouldy jail cell, from which they were dragged on March 18, 1314 to be told that as heretics they would spend the rest of their lives in a mouldy jail cell. But to the wonderment of all, de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney, Master of Normandy for the Templars, staggered to their feet and said the only thing they were guilty of was a cowardly confession under torture to save their own hides at the expense of the Order. They said the Order was pure and holy and innocent, which led to the elaborate French legal proceeding of the king ordering them burnt immediately or rather, set on fire immediately and burnt slowly that very day.

They were, rejecting all offers of a pardon in return for retraction and managing to retain their composure within reason, thus earning themselves the status of martyrs and their charred bones were collected as relics.

Philip got the money though. And as for the Pope’s pardon, which you were wondering when I’d get to, regrettably it was discovered by an Italian paleographer named Barbara Frale in September 2001 in the Vatican Archives, at which point it was a bit late for de Molay’s secular prospects to perk up.

As for the other kind, surely the case gives one pause. Obviously it is not a great bargain to spend the rest of your life in a cell at the mercy of Philip the Fair in Name Only, and besides de Molay was 71 so he might have gotten out soon anyway. But for a man to whom torture was not just a word but a hideous personal reality, in the face of which he had once renounced all he believed in, to step forward a second time and risk among other things the humiliation of once again being unable to bear the pain is a very impressive act.

Who today might do such a thing? Not, one fears, those enjoying the loudest applause and most fulsome praise particularly from themselves. I suppose there have always been more willing to act the role of Philip the Fair or support it than Jacques de Molay. But I have little confidence that all the progress we congratulate ourselves on having experienced has improved that situation.

“the agenda is as clear as mushroom soup” Rami Khouri in Globe and Mail November 22 2007