ABSTRACT
In the classic twentieth-century statement of the outsider, Camus's Lf£trangerf the hero's gradual alienation from society culminates in a courtroom, during a trial that proceeds virtually as if the accused himself were not present. In a little-known Byzantine vision of the otherworld from around the turn of the tenth century, the Apocalypse ofAnastasia, the climax also occurs in a courtroom. The judge is Christ and the court is in heaven, but the trial is as grim and inexorable as Meursault's; the judge, just as oblivious of the defendant and as deaf to the pleas of the defence.1
