Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 107
to my mind an intricate and impenetrable puzzle, one whose
key vanished long ago along with the particular local commu-
nity of Christians who produced it. The tradition of apocalyp-
tic literature upon which it draws, moreover, is one of such
farraginous allegory, and one that consists so thoroughly in
the elaborate veiling of political and religious provocations
behind fabulous dream-images and esoteric symbolisms and
cryptic ciphers, that we delude ourselves if we imagine that-
across a distance of two millennia, and without any knowl-
edge of the secretive community from which the text arose,
and without any inkling of the cryptadia concealed beneath
its countless figural layers- we could hope to grasp even a
shadow of a fragment of its intended message. True, the book
does contain a few especially piquant pictures of final perdi-
tion, if that is what one chooses to cling to as something appar-
ently solid and buoyant amid the whelming floods of all that
hallucinatory imagery; but, even then, the damnation those
passages describe chiefly falls upon patently allegorical figures
like "Hades" (Death personified) or "the Beast" (Rome "bru-
tified"), which hardly seems to allow for much in the way of
doctrinal exactitude. As it happens, the text also contains a
lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, horses with lions' heads
and tails like serpents, giant angels, locusts with iron thoraxes,
a dragon with seven heads and ten horns and wearing seven
diadems, a great whore seated on the beast and bearing a chal-
ice full of abominations, a gigantic city with streets of trans-
parent gold ... (and so on and so forth). One would have to be
something of a lunatic to mistake any of it for a straightforward
statement of dogma.
For myself, for what it is worth, I do not even really think
that Revelation is a book about the end of time, so much as a
manifesto written in figurative code by a Jewish Christian who