The Hospitaller priest gave a blessing, then turned to the deacon who said, “The Mass is ended.
Let us go there now and die with Him.”
Such are the words that mark the beginning of Janusz’s pilgrimage. Janusz is a priest, although that is not apparent to us at first. We meet him as we would any man—a flawed one at that: churlish, foul-tempered, bitter. We discover later that Janusz has lost his priestly vocation owing to a tainted, scandalous past. He is a sinner—the “worst kind of sinner”—and undertakes this pilgrimage as penance. Only this pilgrimage, the sci-fi centerpiece of Andrew Gillsmith’s novella The Jerusalem Passage, is terminal. No one returns. For the weary, the lonely, and the dying, this pilgrimage is “the last resort, a thing undertaken only when the pain of living finally exceeded the fear of death.”
So, as Janusz walks the Passage to the Holy City, he must come to terms with his past. Encounters with fellow pilgrims trigger memories and provoke reflections; and Janusz’s strange, dogged companion, the “old idiot” Leibowitz, midwifes the reemergence of his conscience. There are opportunities aplenty for a moral reckoning if only Janusz would take them. Does he?
Gillsmith has written a clever book. To call it a psycho-spiritual study of a grave sinner disguised as a sci-fi story would be a disservice. The sci-fi elements do not obtrude upon the study of Janusz’s psyche and spirit, but neither is the reverse true. The story is not didactic. Gillsmith’s deep Catholic faith is evident, yet he never ascends the pulpit. I am not a scholar of literature, let alone of science fiction—merely a historian—but I daresay that it is precisely this balance that allows The Jerusalem Passage to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Much of this is made possible by the story’s immersive yet unobtrusive setting. The premise is as follows: The Holy Land has been rendered uninhabitable by a strange epidemic—a disease that traps its victims in madness, catatonia, and ecstasy, killing them within 48 hours. In panic, the nations have sought to contain the spread of the disease; Jerusalem and its environs have been nuked. Gillsmith is sparing with the details. We are told that the Nigerians have built a New Jerusalem, where facsimiles of the old holy sites serve a public willing and eager to forget. Muslims flock to offer their prayers at a rebuilt al-Aqsa mosque; a reconstructed Western Wall hears the lamentations of Jews; and Christians kneel in remembrance at the New Gethsemane. Old Jerusalem has taken on a new, morbid significance. Pilgrims go there to die. Instead of descending en masse upon the Grotto at Lourdes, the afflicted now buy one-way tickets to the Holy Land, hoping to secure their salvation by joining their suffering to Christ’s upon the Cross, or at least to find release in death.
Yet the dark future Gillsmith paints and the sci-fi tropes he sprinkles throughout—smooth public transport, hyper-realistic holographs, Knights Hospitaller in mech suits, and vegetables grown in “real soil”—do not strike the reader as warmed over.
The real strength of The Jerusalem Passage lies in its choice of protagonist. Janusz is not a good man, but as bad as man can be—and he knows it well. It is his psyche where the real horror of this tale is found. His sins are vile and he is afraid. When we first meet Janusz, he would fain deny free will, as though thereby he could disown the transgressions he had freely wrought. The central theme of the tale is thus not whether Janusz is redeemed on his mortal voyage but whether he believes himself capable of redemption—or if he even desires it.
In order to be redeemed, one must accede to redemption, just as penance can only follow the acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Janusz, for all of his self-loathing, cannot bring himself to admit that he has sinned. He condemns the sacrament of confession as a “charade,” as “pure scrupulosity, the simpering cousin of pride.” This is unsurprising. To confess is to take responsibility, but I suspect that Janusz fears not so much this as what comes after: submission for judgment.
By turns, Janusz essentializes his offenses: he is a “sinner,” or he is “sick”; he blames others, and then denies that he has sinned at all. This extends to his reason for undertaking the pilgrimage. While Gillsmith the narrator tells us that only the worst sinners undergo it as a penance, that is not how Janusz sees it. The penitent—no matter how black his sins—has already asked for and received forgiveness; making the Passage is supererogatory detail, the acknowledgment of a debt already waived. Janusz, however, walks the Passage as punishment. He has put himself on Death Row before the jury could even convene; he has damned himself (even though he on occasion doubts the reality of sin) before God could get a word in edgewise.
Gillsmith shows a deft hand in his portrayal of Janusz’s agony; he is even better at illuminating the other theme that weaves through the novella: death. The pilgrimage is not only a journey toward death but a dilation of the moment of death. In that sense, all of life is but a preparation for this moment—a brother of the Order of St. Lazarus says as much. The Lazar remarks that life consists in defying death, in the paradoxical act of contemptuously rushing to meet it. Does Janusz understand this? Or does he treat it with the same callous disregard as he does confession? He does not seem to—at least at first. He sees death as “the illumination of conscience, seeing one’s own sins in the fullness of God’s perception.” But were this so, why contemn it? Why then the drama of salvation?
It is here that we touch the third theme of the story: the old man who attaches himself, like a persistent tick, to Janusz. Those who are familiar with Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz will immediately recognize him as Benjamin, cursed to wander the earth until the Last Day. Gillsmith acknowledges his debt to Canticle in the dedication, and even names the old man Leibowitz. But can a person be a theme? I do not know what literary criticism dictates, but he is certainly one here. I will not be so gauche as to say that he is Janusz’s conscience—although he is prickly and obstinate. He remains his own character (and that is perhaps his tragedy). But in goading and provoking Janusz, he adopts an almost Socratic role. He is no manual of moral theology (which is what many of us imagine the conscience to be), but he does serve to limn Janusz’s murky psyche and, on occasion, draw him back from the brink of despair. He is the one who corrects Janusz, tells him in no uncertain terms that Janusz hates life, which is the same as loving death. For Janusz, then, would death bring illumination? What good would full knowledge of one’s sins bring, absent forgiveness? The answer is not comforting.
Structurally, it is this third theme that elevates what might otherwise have become a clichéd Catholic morality play. Leibowitz has what is best described as a diasporic relationship with the Salvific Plan (insofar as it is revealed to us). He is doomed to walk the earth until the Second Coming; he cannot die. The state of his soul is unknown, yet he is suffused with grace. However, his salvation is not yet at hand. What does that tell us about Janusz’s prospects of redemption?
In sum, The Jerusalem Passage is a demanding but rewarding read. The tone is crisp, the descriptions lush without being gratuitous. The themes are heavy and may be off-putting to some, but Gillsmith handles them with charm, economy, and discipline; never is he overwrought. The novella may be seen as a loving tribute to A Canticle for Leibowitz—certainly both bear the astringent tang of the desert—but it stands on its own as a profound meditation on death, redemption, and conscience by someone who is obviously but not insistently Catholic. It’s, in short, a pilgrimage anyone can take.
