The subject-matter of this essay concerns the question of authenticity and its links with aesthetic and religious experience. It is our contention that an analysis of hermeneutic experience reveals that authenticity, religious, and aesthetic experience are significantly interconnected. Establishing the intimate connections between these modes of experience offers a significant opportunity to document the poignant parallels between Gadamer's approaches to aesthetic and religious experience. This chapter is a response to a key question which Gadamer raises in one of his most recent essays on art: how might the intimate relationship between aesthetic and religious experience be thought? If these two modes of experience “interfere” with one another, as he argues, what feature is it that they share which simultaneously draws them toward and yet repulses them from one another? Although Gadamer bids us think about this question, his writings never directly answer it. Yet his sensitive reading of Heidegger's aesthetics suggests how we might formulate an answer.

The key to our argument concerns the connections between the concept of authenticity and the notion of the withheld. This notion can refer to the implicit meanings presently held within an artwork which have yet to be disclosed and to the future revelations of meaning which a religious faith promises but acknowledges as being presently withheld from us.