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This third volume of Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, published originally in 1957 and reprinted in 1973, contains an impressive collection of highly erudite monographs by distinguished European thinkers, all but one arising out of the Eranos meeting of 1951. It includes Jung's brief essay, ‘On synchronicity’, which was later much expanded and appears almost lightweight in this company. In his foreword, describing the occasion on the shores of Lake Maggiore, Joseph Campbell says: ‘Our minds at this meeting were prodigiously churned’. Reading—or attempting to read—these studies, one is tempted to echo the last words of Proust's magnum opus: ‘They stand like giants, immersed in time.’ What energy and stamina they must have possessed, these Titans of Eranos, how wide-ranging and deeply scholarly their minds. Confronted by such a flood of eloquence and learning, the stunned reviewer can do little more than gesture and marvel, or perhaps diligently assemble a few small stepping-stones on which to perch, much as man himself has always struggled to single out favoured points and intervals and so create an ordered cosmos in space and time.
‘There is no greater obstacle to union with God than time’, wrote Meister Eckhart. Enlarging on this dictum in his discussion on ‘Time and eternity in Indian thought’, Mircea Eliade goes on to remind us that ‘One is devoured by time, not because one lives in time, but because one believes in the reality of time and hence forgets or despises eternity.’ In a paper on ‘Primordial time and final time’ given by G. van der Leeuw at an earlier Eranos meeting shortly before his death and included here in tribute, we are shown St Augustine wrestling with the riddle:
‘If the present is only time, because it flows away into the past, how can we say that it is? For it is, only because it will cease to be. Thus we can affirm that Time is only in that it tends towards not-being.’
How then does man confront such a mystery, balancing precariously on a razo