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Boethius – The Consolation of Philosophy

Think of the extent of the weakness impeding the wicked.  It is not as if the prizes they failed to win were mere sports trophies.  The quest in which they fail is the quest for the highest and most important of all things, and success is denied these wretched men in the very pursuit they toil at night and day to the exclusion of all else, the same pursuit in which the strength of the good stands out.............

For I ask you, what is the cause of this flight from virtue to vice?  If you say it is because they do not know what is good, I shall ask what greater weakness is there than blindness of ignorance.  And if you say that they know what they ought to seek for, but pleasure sends them chasing off the wrong way, this way too, they are weak through lack of self control because they cannot resist vice.  And if you say they abandon goodness and turn to vice knowingly and willingly, this way they not only cease to be powerful, but cease to be at all.

Men who give up the common goal of all things that exist, thereby cease to exist themselves. 

Some may perhaps think it strange that we say that wicked men, who form the majority of men, do not exist; but that is how it is.  I am not trying to deny the wickedness of the wicked; what I do deny is that their existence is absolute and complete existence. 

Just as you might call a corpse a dead man, but couldn't simply call it a man, so I would agree that the wicked are wicked, but could not agree that they have unqualified existence.