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Hegel relates the ‘past’ nature of art – or of the “seriousness” of art – to the shift in the understanding of the divine brought about by Christianity. In Christian religion, through the Incarnation in Jesus, God became a human being and submitted to a destiny of death; having fulfilled this, he remains present and active in human history as a living spirit. According to Hegel, this profound idea of Christian religion “is not capable of being represented sensuously by art”: “art is not the highest expression of the absolute”. In his great hymn Patmos, Hölderlin, at least according to one possible interpretation, addresses the condition of Christian modernity: the deeply felt crisis in the transmission of the vital content of Christianity within the context of the experience of the absence of the divine. How, in this context, can one make sense of the narration of Jesus’ life and death? This paper shows that, in dealing with this issue, Hölderlin calls into question not only the forms of memory but also those of the representation of the divine and poetry itself, apparently foreshadowing for it a condition analogous to that described by Hegel for art in general. However, in the final part of the paper it will be suggested that a role is reserved for poetic discourse in bringing the divine to consciousness and it will be hinted at what that role might be.