The scholar concerned with the pre-Islamic religious history of Iran is beset with many difficulties, not the least of which is the great paucity of native sources. Consequently, he frequently must have recourse to India for parallels in the early period, and to Classical, Syriac and Armenian sources for much of his material in Parthian and Sassanian times. Furthermore, the temptation to import whole patterns of religious thought from neighboring religions, and to interpret earlier information from conditions obtaining in Iran at later periods of its history, is at times very strong indeed. With the fragmentary, often contradictory, data about Iranian religions at hand, there is also a tendency to fill in the blanks, and by so doing to create a finished and consistent whole picture of the pre-Islamic religions of Iran. It may be commendable to have a large canvas with bold, sweeping strokes, but when the details are so uncertain one may be understandably cautious in accepting the theories of even such eminent scholars as Herzfeld, Nyberg, and others.

Lying against the Alpine foothills, the land from which Catullus departed for Rome was the home of many and varied local cults. Inscriptions from the first three centuries of the Empire give laconic testimony to the names of comparatively unknown gods and goddesses or to strange divine epithets which may have been an inheritance of the original Raeti or their Celtic successors who held sway until the Roman conquest. The sphere of religious life revealed in fragmentary form in these monuments was a world removed from that illuminated by the pages of ancient belles lettres; the members of the Roman poetic coteries either exalted the official pantheon or culled less-familiar divine names from the Hellenistic tradition. The reader who expects that an author not native to the city of Rome may shed some light on the religious milieu of his place of origin is therefore fated to an early disappointment.

In 1791, when he was eighteen years of age, Coleridge came across Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although he was sufficiently interested to read the essay, he was not impressed by it. In fact, if one is to judge his reaction by the jeu d'esprit, “Mathematical Problem,” it was chiefly one of amusement. Although he went on to read Burke's other essays, he was attracted by the character of the author and the style of his writing rather than by his point of view; for, certainly a young man who was an avowed disciple of David Hartley, a champion of the French Revolution, and the originator of Pantisocracy could find little comfort in the works of Edmund Burke. But the zeal for Hartley, the French Revolution, and Pantisocracy was short-lived; and by 1796 Coleridge had turned, a “thought-bewilder'd man,” to a reading of Bishop Berkeley.The influence of Berkeley, especially of the later Platonic Berkeley, began to show in his work almost at once; the influence of Burke continued to lag. Out of his reflections on Berkeley, however, came a new admiration for Burke, particularly for his Philosophical Inquiry; and, from the combined teachings of the two, Coleridge ultimately derived suggestions for a theology broad enough to account for and to give meaning and purpose to all human activities. I should like here to indicate briefly the use he made of these suggestions with respect to science, philosophy, and poetry. I do not mean to imply that there were no other influences at work in the formulation of his views; but I do submit that these two influences are basic and that Coleridge's position can be adequately understood only in terms of them.

Greek manuscript II A 7 in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples is an unpublished minuscule codex from around the eleventh century containing the Acts of the Apostles, the Catholic epistles, fourteen epistles of St. Paul (including the Pastorals and Hebrews) and the Apocalypse through chapter three, verse thirteen. The codex was described in detail by Salvator Cyrillus, royal librarian of what was then the Bourbon Library, now the public library in Naples, and more recently and briefly by Gregory and von Soden. The MS. is furnished with a form of the “Euthalian” apparatus including prologues; the Martyrium Pauli; tables of lections, Old Testament quotations, and chapter summaries. The codex also contains a colophon which states, among other things, that the MS. was written by Evagrius