Marsilio Ficino sends greetings to his beloved Amerigo Corsini.
It is said that Apollo, who is the founder of medicine, created two sons with special qualities, Asclepius and Plato: Asclepius to heal the bodies, and Plato to heal the souls. Physicians who follow Asclepius usually treat physical pain with ointments and salves called sedatives because they alleviate pain. The same was the practice of the Academy, which followed Plato’s medicine, to use this kind of medicine for suffering souls, like a soothing salve. Indeed, I myself use it more than anything else, and I make it available to everyone dear to me; therefore, it is certainly available to Amerigo, who is particularly dear to me.
Where is the pain? Where there is love. Remove love and you will remove the pain. But I am not saying that you should remove your love for Good. God forbid that I ask anything bad or impossible from you! On the contrary, it is bad not to love the Good itself, and it is impossible not to love what you love due to the need that arises from your nature.
So, I’m not asking you to give up your love for the Good itself, which is first and foremost and the ultimate good, but rather the love for any separate entity that people consider good. Because to be directed towards them with love means to turn away from the Good itself. The more we turn away from what alone makes things good and orient ourselves towards what is bad without it, the more we plummet into that badness.
Again we ask ourselves, where is the pain? It is where love is, or rather where love is for those things that can be separated from us and taken away. If we are deprived of what we long for, pain burns and tears us apart. If we possess something that we know can be taken away from us at any moment, anxiety haunts us. If what we longed for and conquered is taken away from us, the pain is unbearable.
Therefore, in order not to have to suffer pain, let us love the Good for its own sake, which is the only good in and of itself. Since it is everywhere due to its infinite nature and strength, it cannot be separated; and since it never fails, it cannot be removed. Good never leaves anyone, except those who abandon it themselves; it never rejects anyone, except those who turn away from it. The search for infinite Good is not at all burdensome because our own will seeks and finds it. Holding firmly onto Good does not create anxiety or doubt because the same will that sought and found it, now holds onto it. By loving and holding onto that one Good, we accept all things as good. When we forget that Good, by which everything else becomes good, all things everywhere become bad for us.
Therefore, let us abandon the habit of the mind that pulls us, miserable, towards what is beneath us. Let us adopt a state of mind that elevates us towards the sublime. This will deliver us from the bad; it will free us from pain. It will fill us with everything that is good and give us all joy; joy, I say, that no one will ever take away from us.
This is essentially, dearest Amerigo, what we apply in the case of a sick soul. It is what Plato applied more fully and with greater skill, and the Holy Scripture with greater power and divine authority.