Many commentators have concentrated their attention on the first moment of Mircea Eliade’s dialectic of the sacred, the essentialist one, where the archetype overhangs history, neglecting the second one, where the archetype exists only through its realization in history, and so they give the impression that Eliade is a anhistorical thinker, who conceives time mostly through eternity and not in itself A closer look reveals however that Eliade is a much more historical thinker than what we usually make him to (...) be. Indeed, Eliade considers the miracle of the Incarnation as being the supreme hierophany and the other hierophanies as being its prefigurations. (shrink)