Affliction and resignation in George Herbert: Reflections on human agency in a global pandemic

This paper reflects on the context of lockdown in a global pandemic, where entire populations have experienced severe curtailments of the opportunity to exercise agency. The experience has made me notice the surprisingly large role that resignation has played in Christian moral thinking in earlier ages. This paper takes the devotional poetry of George Herbert as a case study, since Herbert had a particular preoccupation with the psychology of religious belief in circumstances where the will cannot be deployed to any end. Herbert reflects on the predicament in which the moral life has to continue even though opportunities for the exercise of agency have collapsed. After examining Herbert's poems of affliction, I conclude by setting out a brief case for understanding resignation as a moral practice – a practice that centres not on the will but on imagination and the emotions.