Alexander Pushkin, “The Prophet”

Parched with the spirit's thirst, I crossed
An endless desert sunk in gloom,
And a six-winged seraph came
Where the tracks met and I stood lost.
Fingers light as dream he laid
Upon my lids; I opened wide
My eagle eyes, and gazed around.
He laid his fingers on my ears
And they were filled with roaring sound:
I heard the music of the spheres ...

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.”

There is an old illusion--it is called good and evil. Around soothsayers and astrologers hath hitherto revolved the orbit of this illusion.
Once did one BELIEVE in soothsayers and astrologers; and THEREFORE did one believe, "Everything is fate: thou shalt, for thou must!"
Then again did one distrust all soothsayers and astrologers; and THEREFORE did one believe, "Everything is freedom: thou canst, for thou willest!"
O my brethren, concerning the stars and the future there hath hitherto been only illusion, and not knowledge; and THEREFORE concerning good and evil there hath hitherto been only illusion and not knowledge!

"Thou shalt not rob! Thou shalt not slay!"-- such precepts were once called holy; before them did one bow the knee and the head, and take off one's shoes.
But I ask you: Where have there ever been better robbers and slayers in the world than such holy precepts?
Is there not even in all life -- robbing and slaying? And for such precepts to be called holy, was not TRUTH itself thereby -- slain?
-- Or was it a sermon of death that called holy what contradicted and dissuaded from life? -- O my brethren, break up, break up for me the old tables!

From Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’