“Praised be Jesus Christ!”

“Praised be Jesus Christ!” is the greeting that opens The Peasants and establishes a religious formula as one of the novel’s framing expressions. The Parish Priest of Lipce speaks it to Agata as she leaves to beg; the phrase thus introduces a world where faith, land, and language are described as pillars of an apparently fixed order. Its ordinary devotional force remains, but its placement gives it a broader significance: the novel begins by making religious speech part of the shared fabric of village life, even as that life is marked by hardship.

The Opening Exchange

The greeting is answered by “For ever, amen, dear Agata, and where might you be off to, eh?” The exchange makes the formula conversational as well as devotional: the priest’s customary words lead directly to a question about Agata’s departure. Her reply, that she is going out into the wide world, sets the greeting beside the material circumstance of her journey. After signing her property over to her children, she has been driven to beg and to pay her relatives for her care in old age. The sacred language does not remove that economic vulnerability; it accompanies her as she goes.

A Frame Across the Novel

The opening greeting has a structural counterpart at the other end of the narrative. The old beggar closes the novel with “Go with God, dear people,” returning the reader to a familiar religious formula at the point of farewell. Together, the opening and closing expressions give the epic a devotional frame: people are greeted and sent on their way with words that invoke God, while the conditions of their lives remain unresolved.

Religious Formula and Social Order

The greeting can be heard as a commonplace expression of faith, but its framing role also draws attention to helplessness and disengagement from responsibility for the world. Inequality, violence, class conflict, and the political indifference of the nobility and clergy toward rural communities are not settled by religious words; they are suspended or suppressed. Agata’s opening appearance makes the contrast concrete: the invocation of Christ accompanies a custom that leaves an elderly woman begging after she has surrendered her property. The phrase therefore joins religious belonging to the novel’s wider question of how a community treats its inherited order as sacred and unchangeable.