Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 109the saved and the damned-that will nevertheless be suc-
ceeded by a new Age in which the gates of the restored Jeru-
salem will be thrown open, and precisely those who have been
left outside the walls and putatively excluded forever from the
Kingdom will be invited to wash their garments, enter the city,
and drink from the waters of life. I have to say, I could prob-
ably accept this as an attractive alternative to my boringly de-
flationary historicizing approach to the text, if I were able to
think of the book as more mystical than political. And perhaps
I should not be so literalist, and should allow for both readings
at once. After all, the curiously extended coda to the book's
scenes of judgment, considered dispassionately, conforms very
well to that notion of two distinct eschatological horizons that
I described above: the more proximate horizon of historical
judgment, where the good and evil in all of us are brought to
light and (by whatever means necessary) separated; and the
more remote horizon of an eternity where a final peace awaits
us all, beyond everything that ever had the power to divide
souls from each other. If John's apocalypse really is about the
end of all things, then it could clearly be taken as promising
two distinct resolutions to fallen time: the end of history in a
final judgment and then, beyond that, the end of judgment in
a final reconciliation. I will, however, leave the matter there.
Again, I do not believe Revelation to be really an eschatologi-
cal document in anything like the way it has traditionally been
taken, even if I grant that it is cast in shapes provided by some
pre-existing grammar of eschatological hopes and fears; to me
it seems clear that the imaginary landscape traversed by its
garishly figural dramatis personae is situated in some liminal
region between history and eternity, political realities and reli-
gious dreams.
As far as I am concerned, then, those who want to speak