We bowed down before the scriptures
And were taken aback by the silence of the temple.
In the rays of the divine light
The smile of the Woman was remembered.
 
Souls united and silent,
In the same rays and within the same walls,
We perceived the solar waves
Above – on the dark cupolas.
 
And from that ancient gilding,
From those terrible depths,
Onto my holy-day descended Someone
With the smile of the tender Woman.
 
(Blok 18 January 1902 St Isaac’s Cathedral)

In the closing pages of Process and Reality, A N Whitehead condemns the Christian doctrine of God – “ the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys” – as a fallacy which has infused tragedy into history; and he insists that when the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered: “The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.”