Prefatory Note. This letter has a lengthy history. More than thirty years ago I felt the necessity of a knowledge of and clearing up of the modes and lines of thought of unlettered people and wrote down a draft of a lecture upon which I have drawn here. Later on I applied my views to a special field, the concept, or to speak more justly the concepts of the soul, in a lecture delivered to the Fifth Congress for the History of Religions at Lund in 1929. Then I put the subject aside, although it always lurked at the back of my mind. Certain recent tendencies in the science of religion caused me to reconsider the problems involved and to write down a draft in order to coördinate and to systematize my views in regard to certain fundamental questions of this science. I happened to mention this in a letter to Professor Nock, and, as he wanted to take cognizance of the draft I had made for private purposes, I translated it into English and sent it to him. When he wished to publish it I asked him to subject my draft to the judgment of an expert anthropologist and to let me know his opinion. Professor Kluckhohn of Harvard was kind enough to read my manuscript and to supply some useful remarks and references. As he found my considerations useful, I consented to their being printed. I thank these two colleagues warmly for the interest they have taken in them. I am under a heavy debt of gratitude to Mrs. W. L. Sperry for her kindness in undertaking the difficult task of revising my English style in this paper as well as in others which I have published in the Harvard Theological Review.

The origins of the name Xριστιανοί are narrated in the Acts of the Apostles as follows. After Stephen's martyrdom, some believers from Cyprus and Cyrene, who had left Jerusalem, preached at Antioch. Their success became known at Jerusalem, and “the community which was in Jerusalem” sent Barnabas to Antioch. Barnabas in turn brought Paul from Tarsus. For a whole year they worked together and taught many people. Ἐγένετο δὲ αὐτοῖς καὶἐνιαυτὸν ὅλον συναχθῆναι ἐν τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ καὶ διδάξαι ὅχλον ἱκανόν χρηματίσαι τε πρώτως ἐν Ἀντιοχɛίᾳ τοὺς μαθητὰς χριστιανούς (Act, Ap. XI, 26).

The Differences between the developed liturgies of East and West appear at first sight to be matters of purely ecclesiological interest, but more closely examined they are found to shed light on primitive Christian practice and on the growth of the text of the New Testament.

The figure of the rose with which Dante tops the soaring structure of his Paradiso may seem to have stimulated comment enough by now, and the present note, pointing out yet another possible analogue, serve merely to expand the raw bulk of such materials, which, though interesting in themselves, add little essential to our knowledge of the poem. But no Stoffkritik has yet explained entirely happily to the student of the popular otherworld traditions, the origin of this figure in the Divine Comedy or the peculiar fitness of its use there. And the present parallel has the virtue that it is really a parallel, and not confined to the rose alone, whose figure and symbolic significance are common property in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, it describes at the supernal heights of heaven a city which is shaped like a rose, is also the special paradise of the Virgin, and contains traces of another motif — the empty thrones and the waiting crowns and vestments reserved until the Time shall come for the just and the poor in spirit —, which Dante also places for the elect within the limits of this heavenly city. All this, moreover, appears in a work belonging to that body of otherworld lore from which the Divine Comedy, itself the most elaborate literary example of this genre, frequently borrows.