When Love Wears Evil Out

St. Maximus once wrote that “the patience of the saints exhausts the evil power...” What if love doesn’t defeat evil by crushing it — but by outlasting it?

There is an old habit in the Christian imagination of treating evil as if it were a kind of dark substance—an enduring force with its own vitality, something that stands over against God as a rival power. We speak as though love and evil are locked in a long stalemate, equal and opposite, waiting to see which one finally prevails.

St. Maximus the Confessor^[1] saw things differently.

For Maximus, evil has no independent existence. It is not a created “thing” with substance or staying power. It is a deficiency—a misdirection of the will. More than that, it is parasitic. It does not generate life; it feeds on borrowed energy. It depends entirely on the creature’s consent to turn from love toward what he called the passions^[2]—desires curved inward, grasping for control, comfort, or dominance at the expense of communion.

Evil, in other words, cannot sustain itself. It must be fed. It requires participation. It needs an accomplice.

That conviction changes the tone of the struggle. If evil were a substance, it might endure as long as love endures. But if it is parasitic—if it feeds on resentment, retaliation, pride, and fear—then it survives only as long as it is nourished by them. Withdraw the nourishment, and something begins to weaken.

A fire burns fiercely for a time, but only as long as someone keeps adding wood. Stop feeding it, and even the hottest blaze settles into ash.

This is where Maximus makes his quietly astonishing claim: “the patient endurance of the saints exhausts the evil power that attacks them.”^[3] He does not imagine evil being crushed by superior force. He imagines it being worn out. Starved.

Exhausted not by aggression, but by a refusal to play its game. A refusal to mirror violence back into the world. A refusal to let hatred dictate the terms of engagement. When a person suffers and yet resists the pull toward bitterness; when they endure loss without surrendering to vengeance; when they continue, however imperfectly, to turn toward love—evil loses its fuel source.

This is not passivity. It is not naïveté. It is a disciplined, often costly form of resistance. It rests on the conviction that God is not one force among others in a divided universe. The God-who-is-love is not competing with evil as though both share equal footing. Love is not merely an ideal we strive toward; it is the living, personal reality at the heart of everything that exists. It is relational. It seeks communion. It does not coerce, but neither does it demure, blush, wilt, hide, run away, or cower.

Evil, by contrast, has no life of its own. It is a distortion within a creation sustained by love, a thinning of participation in what is most real. And what has no root system of its own cannot last forever.

If evil depends on our participation, then every act of patient, stubborn love is more than moral effort. It is a quiet refusal to keep giving breath to what suffocates life. It is a way of aligning ourselves again with the One whose love does not thin, does not retaliate, does not exhaust.

In a world that runs on outrage and escalation, this sounds almost impractical. But perhaps the long endurance of love is the most subversive force available to us. Not because it overwhelms, but because it remains. Not because it dominates, but because it refuses to become what it opposes.

Evil may flare fiercely for a season, but it does so on borrowed fuel, sustained only by what it can take. The love of God, by contrast, does not depend on what it steals or consumes.

And what feeds on distortion cannot ultimately outlive what is sustained by a Love that is living, patient, and endlessly giving itself for the life of the world.

Sola Caritas,
𝞃Michael

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^[1] St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) was a Byzantine monk and theologian best known for opposing monothelitism (the claim that Christ has only one will), insisting instead that Christ has both a divine will and a human will. For his resistance, he was tried, exiled, and—according to traditional accounts—had his tongue and right hand removed. He died in exile in 662.

^[2] Saint Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain; Christina, Nun. The Philokalia Volumes 1 - 5 The FULL Text (p. 196). (29). Kindle Edition.

^[3] Saint Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain; Christina, Nun. The Philokalia Volumes 1 - 5 The FULL Text (p. 271). (93). Kindle Edition.