In his poem "Hymn to Beauty," Charles Baudelaire asks: "From heaven or hell, O Beauty, come you hence?" His refusal to provide a definitive answer claims a teleological and causal indifference; the origin of Beauty is irrelevant to its effect, which is the differentiation—or rather, the redemption—of the world from its "spleen" and of time from its mundanity. Modernist art is, in significant ways, the epitome of post-secular aesthetics. In this paper, I interrogate the relation between religious and aesthetic experience through these spectral remains. In the aesthetic theories of both Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, we encounter a profound tension between religion, art, and the structure of repetition. The age of modern industrial reproduction meant a total transformation of the artwork and its "auratic" quality—that singular, almost transcendental experience. For Benjamin, the cultic and religious function of art is largely replaced by its social and ideological functioning. Conversely, for Adorno, this transition allowed art to achieve autonomy through the concept of the shudder (Erschütterung). The "shudder" serves as an aesthetic comportment that, in the modern age, safeguards the work from premature theological conclusions, holding together the promise of transcendence and the negation of immanence. On the one hand, one shudders at an uncanny "newness," as Adorno observed in the works of Beckett and Schoenberg—a mimetic reaction to the "cryptically shut," characterized by abstraction and indeterminacy. On the other hand, the shudder is the effect of artworks that have become, in Adorno's words, truly "afterimages of the primordial shudder" (the religious awe) in the age of reification. It is argued in this paper that this profane experience of divine beauty—simultaneously religious and atheistic—which purports toward immanence over transcendence, constitutes the essential condition of modern aesthetics and social life.