ABSTRACT
The title of one of Mircea Eliade's basic books, The Sacred and the Profane, offers a key to his thought about the nature of religion. The sacred is unseen of itself, perhaps, but must be given, or gives us, forms and instruments by which it can be seen and touched; these means are religion. Religion, then, is that which shows ways in which homo religiosus, "religious man", "attempts to remain as long as possible in a sacred universe". In philosophy and religious studies, the new way of thinking has led the philosopher Richard Rorty to challenge the idea that religious reality has a definite independent nature, calling such a presumption "essentialism". One should consider the role of Eliade's structuralism and use of ideal types like homo religiosus. Clearly postmodern people have the same dread of the terror of history as ancients in the Axial Age.
