Responding to Evil

The very last quote from Gil Bailie's tape set "The Poetry of Truth and the Truth of Poetry" is one by JB Langley Casserly.

There is a sense in which we can validly talk about the problem of evil and that significantly enough is the one sense in which the Christian can intelligibly claim that the problem has been solved by Jesus Christ and is therefore in principle solvable by us in and through Jesus Christ. The true problem of evil is not the speculative problem of making sense of the fact of evil in terms of a Christian theodicy, but the problem of learning so to live with evil and to endure its sting without reciprocation; that faith may not be confounded; hope extinguished; and charity transformed into bitterness and hate. That existential problem Christ solved triumphantly on the cross.

He does not mean that we do not take on or fight evil, he is simply pointing out our mimetic nature, that if we respond to evil in its own terms then we confound faith, extinguish hope and turn charity into bitterness and hate – and we lose. Faith, hope and charity of the Gospel is the way of talking about evil, providing a way to exit the labyrinth of violence, and as we live in and through Jesus Christ we participate in the hope of the world.