For whatever it's worth, there's at least a sense in which Proclus agrees with this claim. His ordinary term for something that exists (or, as it's sometimes rendered, "subsists") is a hypostasis. No evils are things of that sort. Rather, he describes evils as having only a parhypostasis, sometimes rendered as "parasitic existence." The key difference comes down to, real beings have a paradigmatic cause, while parasitic existences do not.
Thus, we swing back to the notion of hamartia, which our translator here renders as "sin." This is orignally a term from archery, where it literally means "missing the target." So, for each kind of good/real being, there is some single, uniform ideal target which a thing can come closer to or fall farther away from, while for evils, there is no such single, uniform ideal that they're trying to reach. There is a single bullseye at which the arrow is aimed, but so many ways (and so many degrees) in which it can miss: too high, too low, too far to either side, flying past the target or never making all the way forward to it... In other words, both hitting the target and missing it can only be defined by reference to the good ideal.
As another example, we might think of a line. There's only a single way for a line to be straight, but an indefinite multiplicity of ways to be crooked, or (more accurately) to fall away from, or miss the mark of, straightness.
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Date: 2022-01-19 08:38 pm (UTC)Thus, we swing back to the notion of hamartia, which our translator here renders as "sin." This is orignally a term from archery, where it literally means "missing the target." So, for each kind of good/real being, there is some single, uniform ideal target which a thing can come closer to or fall farther away from, while for evils, there is no such single, uniform ideal that they're trying to reach. There is a single bullseye at which the arrow is aimed, but so many ways (and so many degrees) in which it can miss: too high, too low, too far to either side, flying past the target or never making all the way forward to it... In other words, both hitting the target and missing it can only be defined by reference to the good ideal.
As another example, we might think of a line. There's only a single way for a line to be straight, but an indefinite multiplicity of ways to be crooked, or (more accurately) to fall away from, or miss the mark of, straightness.