“Resist not evil” isn’t some pacifist garbage thrown in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a metaphysical truth. I wrote a little about it here.
Remember, evil is the privation of the good. It being a privation, essentially a nothing, you can’t fight it. You can only fill the whole.
Bruce Charlton has been on this same tear with me lately.
In order to address the widest possible audience; those who describe how to resist evil usually present the problem in that double-negative form: Resisting Evil.
That is: Evil is a negative, so resisting evil makes it a double-negative.
The planners and schemers who seek to make something happen are compelled to focus on evil because there is no general social consensus about what is Good.
Dr. Charlton makes a great point here. People focus on evil as a positive force because of their incomplete or even missing idea of the Good.
If we are going to do anything about evil we must know the good and pursue it. The pursuit of the good is a spiritual pursuit.
When the greatest Good is in sight we can’t but help to bring it about.
