Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 119Then again, we can grow quite attached to our ghosts. That
little thrill of terror they inspire in us when we think we hear
them in the sleepless hours before dawn can be positively de-
lectable, at least in retrospect, once the morning has come.
Perhaps the thought of hell provides many of us a similar de-
light, and that is why we are so willing to see it in the text of
scripture even where it cannot really be found.
My own view, in the end, is that it is absurd to treat any
of the New Testament's eschatological language as contain-
ing, even in nuce, some sort of exact dogmatic definition of
the literal conditions of the world to come. I am quite certain
that, while Christ employed all sorts of imagery regarding final
judgment, and spoke of a discrimination between the righ-
teous and the wicked, and spoke also of the dire consequences
for the latter of their actions in this life, none of it should be
received as anything other than an intentionally heterogenous
phantasmagory, meant as much to disorient as to instruct. I am
quite sure that, had Jesus wished to impart a precise and literal
picture of the Age to come, he could have done so. But, in fact,
the more closely one looks at the wild melange of images he
employed- especially if one enjoys the luxury of being able to
peer down through the strata of conventional translations to
the original Greek of the underlying text-the more the pic-
ture dissolves into evocation, atmosphere, and poetry. This is
only to be expected if we recall the circumstances of Christ's
ministry. There was, before all else, a very particular social and
(in the broadest sense) political aspect to his language. His
condemnations were aimed principally at the rich and power-
ful, and they expressed his rage against those who exploited
and oppressed and ignored the weak, the poor, the ill, the im-
prisoned. He was a prophet of Israel who, like so many of the
prophets of Israel before him, employed the ferocious imagery