Histories of western mysticism begin with Plato; so do histories of the betrayal of Christ by Christianity. The Lutheran and Reformed traditions habitually assume that when we give up Plato we give up mysticism, and that at all events we must give up Plato; if Anglicans reject one it will be Plato, but it is commonly assumed that, once certain caveats are applied, a Christian can embrace both without paradox or heresy. In these disputes it is usual to treat Plato as a philosopher with a system; yet his dialogues are at best drafts or preliminary studies for various systems, and the most famous of them are more charitably read as studies in method. In the first section of this paper I hope to show that, whether considered as a system or as a method, Platonism does not sit well with the philosophy of the first Christians who proceed mainly by exegesis and harmonization of the scriptures. In the second section I turn from dogma to imagery, because those texts of Plato which lend themselves to appropriation by the mystic are those in which Socrates, the principal speaker, expresses his boldest thoughts in similes and myth. I shall argue, however, that the use of the Song of Songs in early and mediaeval literature bespeaks, and may have helped to inspire, a cast of mind that was foreign to that of Plato and his successors. The third section will suggests that protestant mysticism, where it exists, inclines to Platonism, but retains fundamental beliefs in the personal character of God and his benign dealing with his indigent creation that could hardly be expressed in Platonic terms. Finally, I shall examine a number of poems by Yeats, in which the Christian hope of resurrection is supplanted not by a Neoplatonic flight from the world and time, but by the fantasy of translation into a deathless work of art.
