Christian faith and divine will

Christian faith and divine will in The Peasants provide both a language for facing what cannot be controlled and a framework for judging how people treat one another. Prayer, blessings, Masses, and processions gather private fear into shared ritual; yet faith does not erase material interests or village conflict. Its meaning emerges in that tension: the characters entrust life and death to God while continuing to reckon with land, inheritance, work, and justice.

Prayer amid uncertainty

Hanka the Farmstead Keeper’s prayers expose the intimate mixture of fear and hope in religious belief. As a service begins, she fingers her rosary and thinks Maciej Boryna may have died, but fear interrupts the prayer. Her attention shifts almost at once to the farm: its thirty-two morgen, pastures, woodland, buildings, and livestock. She imagines buying out the other claims and keeping the whole property, and takes pride in the prospect of becoming like her father. Prayer does not make her indifferent to inheritance; grief, devotion, and ambition occupy the same consciousness.

The land itself becomes part of Hanka’s religious perception. Looking over ripening rye, barley, oats, clover, beans, potatoes, and flax, she experiences the fields as miraculous and sustaining. She blesses what is hers and gives thanks to Jesus for the world. The Angelus bell sounds as she resumes the rosary, joining the everyday agricultural landscape to the prayer that marks the day. This moment does not separate sacred feeling from possession: the fields inspire gratitude precisely as a source of life and as property whose future matters to her.

That fusion becomes sharper when Jagna appears nearby. Hanka remembers that Jagna has received a six-morgen settlement and feels resentment rise again. The contrast is not between a pious Hanka and a worldly Hanka, but between religious gratitude and unresolved injury within the same person. Faith gives her a language for blessing and thanksgiving; it does not instantly reconcile her to a distribution of land she regards as unjust.

Ritual and communal belonging

Religious and ceremonial practices give individual transitions a public form. When Jagna prepares to leave her mother’s home for marriage, Maciej Boryna takes her by the hand and kneels with her. Her mother takes down the picture, makes the sign of the cross over the couple, and blesses and sprinkles them with holy water. Jagna then asks forgiveness of those present and bids them farewell. The women embrace her in turn, and the gathering sets out on foot toward the church. Blessing and departure are woven together: marriage changes Jagna’s place in the household, while the community’s gestures recognize that passage and make it collective.

The wedding festivities also include a staged, communal ritual in which women lead the veiled Jagna from the storeroom and seat her on a quilt-covered kneading trough. Bridesmaids pretend to capture her, while boys and older men defend her; the gathered company then sings a plaintive farewell. The scene is playful, but its movement echoes the more solemn leave-taking from her mother’s house. Together, these customs show how ritual marks a change of status through coordinated gestures, songs, and the participation of kin and neighbors.

On Christmas Eve, Lipce is busy from daybreak, and the severe frost gives the day a distinctive setting. The account places communal religious observance within the seasonal rhythms of village life: sacred time arrives not apart from weather and work, but amid them. Later, a church procession makes faith visible in the gathered crowd. The banners, priest, red baldachin, monstrance, candles, and singing transform the churchyard into a shared devotional space. People who had been waiting in the heat rise and follow; the procession moves around the church as a current of worship, and the service resumes afterward. Ritual here temporarily gathers the village into one body, even though that unity does not settle its conflicts.

Death, prayer, and intercession

At Maciej Boryna’s deathbed, faith becomes a practice of accompaniment. Ambrozy sings from the prayer book while the family repeats the words, taking turns between prayer and sobbing. Neighbors kneel outside the crowded room and sing the litany beneath the windows, so that the orchard itself seems to join the vigil. The domestic chamber and the space beyond it become one circle of mourning: the prayers do not undo death, but give the bereaved a shared way to remain with the dead man through the night.

The Parish Priest of Lipce explicitly connects prayer for the departed with the soul’s fate, urging the family to order a Mass because it may ease Maciej’s soul and help him toward salvation. His religious counsel also addresses the living. As they prepare to divide the estate, he warns them to do so justly and in harmony, to carry out the dead man’s will, repay debts in full, and avoid harming an orphan. He invokes Maciej’s generosity to the church, recalling his contributions for candles, Masses, and other needs. In this speech, religious duty links care for the dead to concrete obligations among heirs: devotion is measured not only in prayer, but in restraint, fairness, and protection of the vulnerable.

After the men have returned from imprisonment, the villagers gather at the cross. They kneel in a half-circle, pray through tears, and fix their eyes on Christ. The priest completes the prayer and sprinkles the bowed heads with water before greeting the men; the people then rush toward him, and he embraces and blesses them. The scene binds suffering, thanksgiving, and renewed communal contact. The return is not presented as a private relief alone: it is witnessed and ritually received by the village.

Providence and material life

The characters’ appeals to divine will do not remove the need to act. After Maciej’s death, Hanka rejects the suggestion that she cares about wealth, yet begins calculating the inheritance as soon as she is alone. She then kneels to pray and accepts the death as God’s will, while sincerely sighing for the dead man’s soul. The passage preserves both responses rather than resolving one into the other. Providence gives loss a religious interpretation; calculation addresses the practical consequences that remain.

Hanka’s later gratitude likewise follows a change in her circumstances. Overcome by joy and by the warmth and signs of new life around her, she thanks Jesus for the blessing she has received. Her happiness is expressed through prayer, but also through watchfulness over the sleeping members of her household and care for the children. Faith is enacted in attention to vulnerable life as well as in words directed heavenward.

The novel also places such personal devotion within a village divided by claims of right and authority. At a public gathering, Antek Boryna calls the crowd Christian folk and honest Poles as he denounces the manor’s felling of the forest, the refusal of employment, and the injuries villagers believe they have suffered. Religious language helps name a moral community, but the grievance is material and political. Elsewhere, disagreement over Rocho’s guidance shows that even a village confronting officials can divide over whom to trust. Christian faith and divine will thus offer shared forms of prayer and moral appeal without making the community free of conflict. They sustain hope and impose obligations, while leaving the difficult work of justice, inheritance, and solidarity to the people themselves.