Having critically discredited the traditional claims of religion, can art become a therapy for religious desire? My view, which I discuss in with particular reference to Hegel’s, Lukács’s and Carl Schmitt’s critiques of romanticism, is that it cannot. What I see as the tragic quality of modernity resides in the fact that the form of our questions about the meaning and value of human life is still religious, but that we find the claims of religion increasingly incredible and hence move our faith elsewhere, into the aesthetic, the philosophical, the economic, or the political, without any of these spheres being able to provide the kind of response we require. Thus, therapy does not silence the critical voice, and, moreover, such a silence would not be therapeutic: after such knowledge, what forgiveness? But this does not mean that romanticism is redundant or uninteresting, it means rather that we have to expect less from the imagination and accustom ourselves to more minimal transfigurations of reality.