"Christianity 'is essentially faith in an event', whereas the great non-Christian religions maintain the existence of an eternal world 'that stands in opposition to the world of time. The fact of the eternal breaking into time, which gives it duration and turns it into history, is unknown to them.' (Daniélou)+ This trait of being unhistorical is something mysticism shares as well with myth and with primitive religions, which according to Mircea Éliade are characterized by 'their revolt against concrete time, their nostalgia for a periodical return to the mythic time of origins.'" Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance 40.
"The experience upon which all else depends in mysticism expresses itself only in symbols: the heart of it is the same in all ages. It is not the exact time of the experience that matters but its content, which signifies a transcending and relativizing of everything temporal. But the divine calling that the prophet knows has come to him can be dated; there is a here-and-now about it, a story is beginning from it: a relationship has been established, and relationships between persons have a historical character--they are what we call history." Ibid., 39-40.
+Daniélou, The Lord of History, Chicago: Longmans, Green, 1964, 109.
"The first characteristic of Christianity is belief in an event, the resurrection of Christ, which represents an incursion of God's action into the historical process, a radical change in the conditions of human life, an absolutely new thing...The great non-Christian religions know of an eternal world over against the world of time; but they know nothing of an irruption of one into the other, giving substance and form to the flux of time, making it into history.
"Greek thought furnishes examples, in the Platonic theory of ideas, and in the Stoic theory of eternal recurrence. But I am more concerned now with living religious systems. Mircéa Eliade has noted the 'revolt' of primitive religions 'against concrete, historical time, their nostalgia for a periodical return to the mythical time of the beginning of things'. (The Myth of Eternal Return [trs. Trask, 1955], p. ix.) The aim of primitive ritual is to get away from the small change of common life into the single eternity of first things: it is the 'abolition of time through the imitation of archetypes and the repetition of paradigmatic gestures...'"
