Sin, repentance, and divine judgment

Sin, repentance, and divine judgment are both intimate religious experiences and forces of public judgment in the novel. Hanka turns toward prayer to confess her own perceived failings and plead for mercy for Antek; later, a priest’s denunciation of Antek makes sin a communal accusation, followed by the crowd’s withdrawal from him. The contrast exposes a tension between repentance as a plea for compassion and judgment as a demand for punishment and exclusion.

Private Confession and the Plea for Mercy

During Mass, Hanka avoids the packed nave and withdraws to a dark, empty side aisle. At the altar of the Assumption, she kneels, kisses the ground, and addresses herself to prayer before the image of the merciful Mother. The setting makes her confession deliberately private: amid a church full of worshippers, she seeks to stand alone before God rather than be absorbed into the congregation.

Her remorse is not limited to a single offense. Hanka reviews her own character and conduct, calling herself sinful for being unhelpful, conceited, quarrelsome, slovenly, fond of eating well and resting, and sluggish in serving God. These details make penitence an act of self-accusation that reaches into ordinary habits as well as grave wrongdoing. She interprets her suffering through a religious account of fault and punishment, and her tears and pleas convey how completely that account has taken hold of her.

Yet her prayer is also directed beyond herself. Hanka asks compassion for Antek’s grave sins and trespasses, bringing his guilt before the same merciful figure before whom she has confessed her own. The passage compares her pleading to a small bird beating its wings against a window while seeking rescue. Its image joins vulnerability to confinement: she can plead, but cannot remove the suffering or secure mercy by her own power. Her grief becomes bodily in the description of tears flowing like blood-stained pearls across the cold floor. When the rite ends, she leaves strengthened and trusting in God’s help; prayer has not erased her troubles, but has changed how she bears them.

The Church as a Place of Public Judgment

Antek’s experience in church follows a sharply different course. During the first Sunday of Lent, the congregation sings the Bitter Lamentations, a service centered on meditations on Christ’s Passion. The music initially overwhelms Antek: he forgets why he came, sinks into drowsiness, and feels himself drawn toward something luminous. The service’s collective sound briefly absorbs him, but the priest’s repeated, stern attention keeps him exposed to the congregation’s gaze.

After the singing, the priest preaches on Christ’s Agonies and condemns the community’s sins, including quarrelling, brawling, and drunkenness. The sermon then narrows its force onto Antek, admonishing wayward sons who burn their fathers’ houses and seducers whom both eternal fire and human judgment will punish. The accusation is not delivered as a private correction. The priest turns Antek’s conduct into a public example, and the congregation understands whom he means.

The change in the crowd makes judgment visible. People look toward Antek, then edge away from him as if his sin were contagious. The priest urges them to refuse him shelter, food, and drink, and to drive such offenders away unless they repent and make amends. Religious condemnation thus acquires a material consequence: a person judged sinful may also be denied the ordinary protections of communal life. The church becomes at once a place of worship and a scene where moral authority organizes social rejection.

Recognition, Shame, and Resistance

Antek leaves while the priest’s voice still pursues him. Outside, he makes for the forest along the poplar road in darkness and rain, carrying the denunciation inward as a sound that continues to ring in his ears. Alone beneath a tree, he admits that the priest was right and calls upon Jesus. In that moment, he feels he has perceived his faults and sins; shame tears through him with an intensity that makes recognition feel less like calm understanding than a wrenching exposure.

That recognition does not settle into repentance. Antek soon erupts in anger, blaming the priest and finding his old resentment and fantasies of revenge returning. The sequence makes his response unstable rather than redemptive: the sermon briefly breaks through his resistance, but shame gives way to hostility. The scene therefore distinguishes acknowledgment of wrongdoing from lasting change. A person may recognize the force of an accusation without accepting the authority that delivers it or acting on its call to repent.

Divine Punishment and the Village’s Moral Story

Later, news of the village’s misfortunes prompts an older woman to wonder whether wickedness has settled in Lipce. The reply frames the events as a possible scourge for people’s sins and identifies Antek’s offense with his stepmother as a mortal sin for which the Lord Jesus punishes people. This exchange shows religious interpretation at work beyond the church service: villagers use sin and divine punishment to make sense of personal misconduct and collective hardship.

The belief does not remain an abstract explanation. On hearing the reports, Agata trembles, crosses herself, and begins to pray. Her gesture echoes the penitential actions inside the church, but here it is prompted by alarming news and fear of what that news signifies. The novel places such popular faith alongside the priest’s formal denunciation and Hanka’s anguished private prayer, revealing different settings for the same moral vocabulary.

Across these episodes, divine judgment is never simply identical with mercy. Hanka’s confession seeks compassion, particularly for Antek; the priest’s sermon demands repentance and authorizes the congregation to withdraw its support; Antek’s shame opens briefly onto self-recognition before resentment returns; and village speech reads suffering as punishment. Together, these scenes show how belief in sin can console and orient the afflicted while also intensifying blame. Repentance offers a possible path back, but the social consequences of judgment may begin before that path is taken.