Golden Rule in Hinduism: the Mahābhārata and Narayana Hitopadesha

THE GOLDEN RULE IS FOUND ENSCONCED WITHIN the lengthy Hindu epic poem, the Mahābhārata. The Mahābhārata is one of the two major epics of ancient India, and is one of Hindu's most important religious narratives. Although the Mahābhārata as a whole is not widely known in the West, and its length is virtually overawing [about 100,000 verses, 1.8 million words, ten times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined; in the Critical Edition of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (the "Pune" or "Poona" edition), the Mahābhārata was 13,000 pages in 19 volumes!], the popular Bhagavad Gita, which is well-known, is part of it. The text of the Mahābhārata is quite old, parts of it reach back to the 4th century B.C., but in its final form it probably stems from the early Gupta period (4th century A.D.). The Mahābhārata is divided into 18 books or parvas. The Golden Rule is found in Book 13 or the Anushasana Parva (Book of Instructions). The Golden Rule is the rule of righteousness: it is Dharma (धर्म) Its opposite, selfishness and disregard for others, is Adharma (अधर्म).

Mahābhārata English Anasuna Parva Section CXIII Kisari Mohan Ganguli, trans.

Mahabarata Sanksrit महाभारत

"Yudhishthira said, 'Abstention from injury, the observance of the Vedic ritual, meditation, subjugation of the senses, penances, and obedient services rendered to the preceptors,--which amongst these is fraught with the greatest merit with respect to a person?' "Vrihaspati said, All these six are fraught with merit. They are different doors of piety. I shall discourse upon them presently. Do thou listen to them, O chief of the Bharatas! I shall tell thee what constitutes the highest good of a human being. That man who practices the religion of universal compassion achieves his highest good. That man who keeps under control the three faults, viz., lust, wrath, and cupidity, by throwing them upon all creatures (and practices the virtue of compassion), attains to success He who, from motives of his own happiness, slays other harmless creatures with the rod of chastisement, never attains to happiness, in the next world. That man who regards all creatures as his own self, and behaves towards them as towards his own self, laying aside the rod of chastisement and completely subjugating his wrath, succeeds in attaining to happiness. The very deities, who are desirous of a fixed abode, become stupefied in ascertaining the track of that person who constitutes himself the soul of all creatures and looks upon them all as his own self, for such a person leaves no track behind. One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one's own self. This, in brief, is the rule of Righteousness. One by acting in a different way by yielding to desire, becomes guilty of unrighteousness. In refusals and gifts, in happiness and misery, in the agreeable, and the disagreeable, one should judge of their effects by a reference to one's own self. When One injures another, the injured turns round and injures the injurer. Similarly, when one cherishes another, that other cherishes the cherisher. One should frame one's rule of conduct according to this. I have told thee what Righteousness is even by this subtile way.' "Vaisampayana continued, 'The preceptor of the deities, possessed of great intelligence, having said this unto king Yudhishthira the just, ascended upwards for proceeding to Heaven, before our eyes.'"

1 [य] अधर्मस्य गतिर बरह्मन कथिता मे तवयानघ धर्मस्य तु गतिं शरॊतुम इच्छामि वदतां वर कृत्वा कर्माणि पापानि कथं यान्ति शुभां गतिम 2 [बृहस्पति] कृत्वा पापानि कर्माणि अधर्मवशम आगतः मनसा विपरीतेन निरयं परतिपद्यते 3 मॊहाद अधर्मं यः कृत्वा पुनः समनुतप्यते मनः समाधिसंयुक्तॊ न स सेवेत दुष्कृतम 4 यथा यथा नरः सम्यग अधर्मम अनुभाषते समाहितेन मनसा विमुच्यति तथा तथा भुजंग इति निर्मॊकात पूर्वभुक्ताज जरान्वितात 5 अदत्त्वापि परदानानि विविधानि समाहितः मनः समाधिसंयुक्तः सुगतिं परतिपद्यते 6 परदानानि तु वक्ष्यामि यानि दत्त्वा युधिष्ठिर नरः कृत्वाप्य अकार्याणि तदा धर्मेण युज्यते 7 सर्वेषाम एव दानानाम अन्नं शरेष्ठम उदाहृतम पूर्वम अन्नं परदातव्यम ऋजुना धर्मम इच्छता 8 पराणा हय अन्नं मनुष्याणां तस्माज जन्तुश च जायते अन्ने परतिष्ठिता लॊकास तस्माद अन्नं परकाशते 9 अन्नम एव परशंसन्ति देवर्षिपितृमानवाः अन्नस्य हि परदानेन सवर्गम आप्नॊति कौशिकः 10 नयायलब्धं परदातव्यं दविजेभ्यॊ हय अन्नम उत्तमम सवाध्यायसमुपेतेभ्यः परहृष्टेनान्तरात्मना 11 यस्य हय अन्नम उपाश्नन्ति बराह्मणानां शता दश हृष्टेन मनसा दत्तं न स तिर्यग्गतिर भवेत 12 बराह्मणानां सहस्राणि दश भॊज्यनरर्षभ नरॊ ऽधर्मात परमुच्येत पपेष्व अभिरतः सदा 13 भैक्षेणान्नं समाहृत्य विप्रॊ वेद पुरस्कृतः सवाध्यायनिरते विप्रे दत्त्वेह सुखम एधते 14 अहिंसन बराह्मणं नित्यं नयायेन परिपाल्य च कषत्रियस तरसा पराप्तम अन्नं यॊ वै परयच्छति 15 दविजेभ्यॊ वेदवृद्धेभ्यः परयतः सुसमाहितः तेनापॊहति धर्मात्मा दुष्कृतं कर्म पाण्डव 16 षड्भागपरिशुद्धं च कृषेर भागम उपार्जितम वैश्यॊ ददद दविजातिभ्यः पापेभ्यः परिमुच्यते 17 अवाप्य पराणसंदेहं कार्कश्येन समार्जितम अन्नं दत्त्व दविजातिभ्यः शूद्रः पापात परमुच्यते 18 औरसेन बलेनान्नम अर्जयित्वाविहिंसकः यः परयच्छति विप्रेभ्यॊ न स दुर्गाणि सेवते 19 नयायेनावाप्तम अन्नं तु नरॊ लॊभविवर्जितः दविजेभ्यॊ वेद वृद्धेभ्यॊ दत्त्व पापात परमुच्यते 20 अन्नम ऊर्जः करं लॊके दत्त्वॊर्जस्वी भवेन नरः सतां पन्थानम आश्रित्य सर्वपापात परमुच्यते 21 दानकृद्भिः कृतः पन्था येन यान्ति मनीषिणः ते सम पराणस्य दातारस तेभ्यॊ धर्मः सनातनः 22 सर्वावस्थ मनुष्येण नयायेनान्नम उपार्जितम कार्यं पात्रगतं नित्यम अन्नं हि परमा गतिः 23 अन्नस्य हि परदानेन नरॊ दुर्गं न सेवते तस्माद अन्नं परदातव्यम अन्याय परिवर्जितम 24 यतेद बराह्मण पूर्वं हि भॊक्तुम अन्नं गृही सदा अवन्ध्यं दिवसं कुर्याद अन्नदानेन मानवः 25 भॊजयित्वा दशशतं नरॊ वेद विदां नृप नयायविद धर्मविदुषाम इतिहासविदां तथा 26 न याति नरकं घॊरं संसारांश च न सेवते सर्वकामसमायुक्तः परेत्य चाप्य अश्नुते फलम 27 एवं सुखसमायुक्तॊ रमते विगतज्वरः रूपवान कीर्तिमांश चैव धनवांश चॊपपद्यते 28 एतत ते सर्वम आख्यातम अन्नदानफलं महत मूलम एतद धि धर्माणां परदानस्य च भारत

In one sense, the Golden Rule in Hinduism is more extreme that that of Christianity, in that it extends beyond other men, to all of brute creation. This solicitude largely stems from the Hindu belief of metempsychosis or reincarnation and the transmigration of souls (the result of which is to sacralize animals, or viewed another way, extend the universe of human souls to outside the bodies of men and women). From a Christian standpoint this extension is dogmatically erroneous. (That is not, however, to suggest that animals may be mistreated or abused.)

Mahābhārata English Rajadharmanusasana Parva Section LXVI Kisari Mohan Ganguli, trans.	Mahabarata Sanksrit महाभारत
It is certainly sacred, O tiger among men. That man who regards all creatures to be like his own self, who never does any harm and has his wrath under control, obtains great happiness both here and hereafter.	(Sanskrit text not found)

The Golden Rule is also evidenced in the Hitopadesha, which is a collection of Sanksrit fables written in the 12th century A.D. that intend to give advice and to instruct particularly the young in a manner of life. We find the following in Book I of the Hitopadesha, named Mitralabha, Gaining Friends, in the tale of the Traveler and the Tiger.

As our life to you is dear,
So is his to every creature.
The good, for all, compassion bear
By analogy with their own nature.

Of aye and nay, of pain and pleasure
Of what may nice or nasty be,
Man can get the truest measure
By making self-analogy.
. . .
As dirt, to see the wealth of others
And wives of other men, as mothers;
In creatures all, yourself reflected:
Who sees thus is the man perfected.
[Who feels for others as he feels for self,
He is [a] true pandit, he is [a] true wise man.]

Narayana Hitopadesa (London: Penguin, 2006) (A.N.D. Haksar, trans.), 19 (last two verses are as quoted in H. T. D. Rost, The Golden Rule: A Universal Ethic (Oxford: Goerge Ronald, 1986), 29 (citing erroneously as the Manu smirti as quoted by Bhagavan Das in his Essential Unity of All Religions).

In assessing Hinduism's Golden Rule, we should keep in mind that Hinduism's great virtue is atmaupamya, the notion that the same soul resides in every being. The term atmaupamya, literally means a substantial equality, that is, identity, of others with oneself, is used in the Bhagavad Gita (śloka VI.32).

He, O Arjuna, who sees with equality everything, in the image of his own self, whether in pleasure or in pain, he is considered a perfect yogi.

The concept stems ultimately from the Upanishads. For example, verse 6 of the Isah (Isavasya) Upanishad states:

The wise man who realizes all beings as not distinct from his own self, and his own self as the self of all beings, does not, by virtue of that perception, hate anyone.

There is thus a fundamental difference that exists behind the Golden Rule as understood by the Christian and Jewish religious traditions, and the Eastern traditions such as Hinduism. It would seem that the Golden Rule is ultimately intra-personal in Hinduism, in the sense that the Hindu sees all creation substantively one with Brahman, while the Christian and Jewish sense of the rule is ultimately inter-personal, where we are all one under and in God, without ever losing our individual personhood. As Fr. Mariasusai Dhavamony explains it: "He who practises the golden rule [as understood in Hinduism] constitutes himself the soul of all creatures and looks upon them all as his own self. The meaning is certainly that such a man identifies himself with Brahman (the Absolute) and hence leaves no trace of his own self." Mariasusai Dhavamony, S.J., Hindu Spirituality (Rome: Editrice Pontifica Universitá Gregoriana 1999), 192.

While there is therefore a significant parallel between the understanding of the Golden Rule in Hinduism, and that of the Golden Rule in Christianity and Judaism, we ought not to be lulled into thinking them identical. There is a significant distinction in anthropological and theological assumptions behind the two rules. In practice, however, it may be that there is a great overlap between the two, and so Hinduism, like Christianity, has a great regard for human life, family life, and discipline over the passions, which, if uncontrolled can be so damaging to others.

May all our laws be farious!

THE WORD NEFARIOUS is common enough. The etymology of nefarious is itself interesting, and reveals a gap in our language. The word nefarious comes to us from Latin nefarius, a combination of the negative prefix "ne" (=not) and "fari" (=speak). In Latin, the word nefarius was an adjective derived from the noun nefas, the word for crime or great wickedness. The word nefas is a compound word derived from the combination of ne (not) and fas (right, divine law, divine speech). Fas is perhaps the Western equivalent to the Eastern notion of dharma, or the Greek themis. As St. Isidore defined it in his Etymologies: Fas lex divina est, ius lex humana. Etym. V, ii. 2. Fas is divine law, ius is human law. The Roman historian Livy states in Book 33 of his History of Rome regarding the Isthmian Games and in reference to the Romans: "There is," people said, "one nation which at its own cost, through its own exertions, at its own risk has gone to war on behalf of the liberty of others. It renders this service not to those across its frontiers, or to the peoples of neighbouring States or to those who dwell on the same mainland, but it crosses the seas in order that nowhere in the wide world may injustice and tyranny exist, but that right and equity and law may be everywhere supreme. (ubique ius fas lex potentissima sint) By this single proclamation of the herald all the cities in Greece and Asia recover their liberty." Livy, 33.33, 7. The notion of fas carried with it the notion that there was a law (fas) above the law (lex and ius). Accordingly, someone who was nefarius was someone who engaged in nefas, that is one who was not in accord with, who had departed from, the divine law or divine utterance (fas). In Latin there was a common saying: per fas aut (or et) nefas, meaning through right or wrong, or as we may say it, by hook or by crook.

It is unfortunate that the positive notion of farius did not also come into our language. In other words, though a law may be said to be nefarious, it would be a neologism to say that a law is farious or in accord with divine law. Though the adjective farious is not commonly used in the English as meaning in accord with divine law, it has found its way into common use in the fields of biology or botany. The word farious is used by biologists and botanists in the sense of arrangement, order, or ways. Thus, bifarious is an adjective that describes plants pointing in two ways, or in two rows. The word also finds use in unifarious (one part, row, ordering, or ranks), trifarious (three ranks), quadrifarious (arranged in four ranks), quinquefarious (five), septifarious (seven), and omnifarious, or plurifarious (many orderings or ranks). More commonly, we see the concept in the word multifarious, a word which has found its way in common English usage, and which means including many parts or things, a great multiplicity of parts or ways or orderings.

White Veratrum (Veratrum album)
and its trifariously arranged leaves

Used in its original sense, a nefarious law is no law at all, something with which St. Augustine in his On the City of God, St. Thomas in his Summa Theologiae, or Martin Luther King in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" would be in agreement. A farious law, on the other hand, is a law consonant with divine law, with the natural law. A farious law is one that binds in conscience, for even human law, if consonant with divine law, binds in conscience. A farious law is one that is not crooked or out of the way, but, quite the opposite, is straight, singular, and on the way.

May all our laws be farious!

"Petit pan de mur jaune"--Proust, Vermeer, the Color Yellow, and the Natural Law

The French writer Marcel Proust, in his À la recherche du temps perdu, contains a well-known passage which relates to the notion of the natural moral law and the natural dispositions or tendencies hidden in man. From time to time, these are felt particularly strongly. Often, these moments are called "epiphanies" or "revelations" by those who experience them. These point to a Beyond as the source of standards by which man ought to conform his life. In this instance, Proust, drawing upon a personal experience, has one of his protagonists, the elderly writer Bergotte, visit a Dutch art exhibition. While examining the detail of Vermeer's View of Delft, the old writer falls ill and dies. The seeming innocuous element that triggers Bergotte's last-minute musings is the small piece of yellow wall, a petit pan de mur jaune.

The Death of Bergotte

by Marcel Proust

The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer's `View of Delft' (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. "That's how I ought to have written," he said. "My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of color, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. "All the same," he said to himself, "I shouldn't like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers." He repeated to himself: "Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: "It's nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked." A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self- sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there – those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only – if then! – to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable.

They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

Un petit pan de mur jaune! a little patch of yellow wall! As Christians, we must overlook the Proustian reference to Platonic metempsychosis, as we must reject Proust's empirically-based nihilism and the decadence which infects his work as a whole. But a Catholic will spot the good within the bad, the true within the false, the Christ among the thieves. Perhaps it is best to invoke the guidance of the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel on the meaning of this epiphany.

[W]hat is here strongly asserted, and what should certainly be retained, is the transcendent character (in the exact and non-theological senses of the word) of the standards to which the true man, together with the artist, recognizes that he must conform his life; but it is also the refusal, implicit at least, to be satisfied with a purely abstract set of rules, it is consequently the rehabilitation of what in the last analysis we must agree to call the Beyond. . . . [I]t seems to me admirable that the writer who has perhaps gone further than any other in micro-psychological investigation should have been able to recognize, at least in certain great moments, the existence of fixed stars in the heaven of the soul. . . .

The reflections of Proust and Marcel bear a striking similarity to those of the Indian philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore:

When the fruit has served its full term, drawing its juice from the branch as it dances with the wind and matures in the sun, then it finds in its core the call of the beyond and become ready for its career of a wider life.

The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Atlantic Publisher, 2007), IV, 375.

All this is quite classical. The color yellow is linked with the interlaced nature of time, and of life, and of that time when life is at the end of its stages, when life is drying out, and the hope of a beyond is what begins to motivate us. The typical memento mori, or a mediation on death enjoined on us by all spiritual writers, is an effort to place us in an artificial yellow mood, as it were, where we contemplate life as if we are in the throes of death. But the specter of death is universal. So in Pseudo-Aristotle, in the treatise on colors (de Coloribus), this understanding of the color yellow makes its appearance. Leaves of trees yellow at the end, when nourishment fails and dessication follows, but before all color departs. Similarly fruits will fall off a tree and yellow because of the failure of nutrition. We ought to learn from the plants, and from their fruit.


Following the Frenchman Proust, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges also links the color yellow, in this case a yellow rose, to an epiphany relating to the "Beyond." These are the dying thoughts of the illustrious Giambattista Marina:

Ni aquella tarde ni la otra murió el ilustre Giambattista Marino, que las bocas unánimes de la Fama (para usar una imagen que le fue cara) proclamaron el nuevo Homero y el nuevo Dante, pero el hecho inmóvil y silencioso que entonces ocurrió fue en verdad el último de su vida. Colmado de años y de gloria, el hombre se moría en un vasto lecho español de columnas labradas. Nada cuesta imaginar a unos pasos del sereno balcón que mira al poniente y, más abajo, mármoles y laureles y un jardín que duplica sus graderías en un agua rectangular. Una mujer ha puesto en una copa una rosa amarilla; el hombre murmura los versos inevitables que a él mismo, para hablar con sinceridad, ya lo hastían un poco:

Púrpura del jardín, pompo del prado,
Gema de primavera, ojo de abril...

Entonces ocurrió la revelación. Marino vio la rosa, como Adán pudo verla en el Paraíso, y sintió que ella estaba en su eternidad y no en sus palabras y que podemos mencionar o aludir pero no expresar y que los altos y soberbios volúmenes que formaban un ángulo de la sala en la penumbra de oro no eran (como su vanidad soñó) un espejo del mundo, sino una cosa más agregada al mundo.

Esta iluminación alcanzó Marino en la víspera de su muerte, y Homero y Dante acaso la alcanzaron también.

Neither that afternoon nor the next did the illustrious Giambattista Marino die, he whom the unanimous mouths of Fame — to use an image dear to him — proclaimed as the new Homer and the new Dante. But still, the noiseless fact that took place then was in reality the last event of his life. Laden with years and with glory, he lay dying in a huge Spanish bed with carved bedposts. It is not hard to imagine a serene balcony a few steps away, facing the west, and, below, marble and laurels and a garden whose various levels are duplicated in a rectangle of water. A woman has placed in a goblet a yellow rose. The man murmurs the inevitable lines that now, to tell the truth, bore even him a little:

Purple of the garden, pomp of the meadow,
Gem of the spring, April’s eye . . .

Then the revelation occured: Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.

Marino achieved this illumination on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well.

Through the yellow rose, Marino was brought back "to the beginning," in principio, at the creation of heaven and earth, as the yet-unfaulted Adam may have seen it. For those with eyes, or touched by grace, the entirety of the eternal law can be seen in the petal of a yellow rose! A world within a world, a world invisible superadded to the world visible. And we need not wait 'til death to see it if we open ourselves to it.

The color yellow is an intermediate color, between a vital green and the color beyond. It thus partakes in both life and death, and informs us of both life's end, its terminus ad quem, and its lasting in time, its temporality. It is a desiccating, though not dessicated, color, the color of the humours of the blood evaporating, but not yet fully evaporated, through the passage of time and heat of life. It is a color of late life, not a color of death, though it points to death's closeness. It is a color that looks both toward the past, and towards the future. Wistful, on the one hand, and either hopeful (if one hopes for a life in the time beyond) or full of despair (if one does not), on the other hand. It is a color interim, a color in flux, a Heraclitean color, and so suffers from a certain temporal ambiguity.

For Proust and for Borges, therefore, the color yellow is the color that serves to remind us of the "call of the Beyond," Plato's ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, C. S. Lewis's "deep Magic," the Thomistic "Eternal Law," Marcel's "fixed stars in the heaven of the soul," the Hindu Dharma, or Lao Tze's Dao. Call it what you will with the lights that God has given you, it is the Word of God in the order of things. Ultimately, though you may not recognize it, though you may be ignorant of it, though you may even disbelieve it, it is the voice of the Logos, the one who became man for us, Jesus, who is our Law. Perhaps that is the wisdom behind Tertullian's observation: anima naturaliter Christiana, the soul is naturally Christian.

This is also the reason--perhaps--why Gauguin painted his yellow Christ, his Le Christ jaune, a Christ that speaks of life's shortness, and life's eternity. A Christ that beckons us to the beyond. A Christ crucified in the fields of Breton, yet a Christ crucified for all times. A Christ dead before the pious wives of Breton peasants, yet a Christ dead before all mankind. In autumn, yet for all seasons.

V. Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi.
R. Quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.

"Lex Christianorum crux est sancta Christi, filii Dei vivi."
--Pseudo-Cyprian, De duobus montibus Sina et Sion