Although he was not himself a believer in sacraments, soteriological doctrines or a personal God, Gadamer was well aware that his ideas drew on a legacy of self-understanding and self-cultivation with roots in the philosophies of ancient Greece, German mysticism, poetry and piety, as well as the Bildung tradition of European thought. Even in his seventies, his readings of favourite poets—Stefan George, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke—showed how they express, as he put it, that ‘for us all that the experience of the divine is unavoidable, even when “God denies”’. In this chapter we see how he developed a model of our basic human desire for an ‘experience of the whole and ourselves in the whole’—and of how that desire could be fulfilled. Far from the idea of transcendence central to religion for thinkers like Levinas, Derrida and Marion, Gadamer unites Stoic and Platonic, Pietist, and Bildung traditions in a distinctively modern form of spirituality. Focusing on three key elements—the creative shaping of one’s life, the knowledge of the self as part of the whole, and a recognition of the infinity and ultimate mystery of the world—his vision of a future spirituality is at once ‘sublime’ and secular.