called a mystic, and that in any case there is very
little resemblance between the philosophy of his dialogues and the
semi-Oriental Mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. I do not
dispute either of these statements; and yet I wish to keep the name of
Plato in the title of this Lecture. The affinity between Christianity
and Platonism was very strongly felt throughout the period which we
are now to consider. Justin Martyr claims Plato (with Heraclitus[107]
and Socrates) as a Christian before Christ; Athenagoras calls him the
best of the forerunners of Christianity, and Clement regards the
Gospel as perfected Platonism.[108] The Pagans repeated so
persistently the charge that Christ borrowed from Plato what was true
in His teaching, that Ambrose wrote a treatise to confute them. As a
rule, the Christians did not deny the resemblance, but explained it by
saying that Plato had plagiarised from Moses--a curious notion which
we find first in Philo. In the Middle Ages the mystics almost
canonised Plato: Eckhart speaks of him, quaintly enough, as "the great
priest" (_der grosse Pfaffe_); and even in Spain, Louis of Granada
calls him "divine," and finds in him "the most excellent parts of
Christian wisdom." Lastly, in the seventeenth century the English
Platonists avowed their intention of bringing back the Church to "her
old loving nurse the Platonic philosophy." These English Platonists
knew what they were talking of; but for the mediaeval mystics Platonism
meant the philosophy of Plotinus adapted by Augustine, or that of
Proclus adapted by Dionysius, or the curious blend of Platonic,
Aristotelian, and Jewish philosophy which filtered through into the
Church by means of the Arabs. Still, there was justice underlying this
superficial ignorance. Plato is, after all, the father of European
Mysticism.[109] Both the great types of mystics may appeal to
him--those who try to rise through the visible to the invisible,
through Nature to God, who find in earthly beauty the truest symbol of
the heavenly, and in the imagination--the image-making faculty--a raft
whereon we may navigate the shoreless ocean of the Infinite; and
those who distrust all sensuous representations as tending "to nourish
appetites which we ought to starve," who look upon this earth as a
place of banishment, upon material things as a veil which hides God's
face from us, and who bid us "flee away from hence as quickly as may
be," to seek "yonder," in the real