Abstract

There is no general agreement as to whether Plato was a mystic. With the texts available, one wonders why a definitive conclusion is so hard to establish. The problem lies not only with the interpretation of Plato, but also with the equivocation and vagueness of the term “mysticism.” Using Plato’s simple classification of definitional meaning for our purposes, mysticism is not a word like “iron,” but like “just” or “good.” Men dispute what is meant by words of the latter class, the disputes yielding as many seemingly “clear” definitions as there are individuals. Hence, unless a definition is agreed upon at the outset, we will continue to disagree as to whether Plato is a mystic, each of us meaning by mysticism something quite different. What follows is an attempt to place several reputable definitions of mysticism beside Plato’s writings, in order to give some small indication of the complexity of his position. Simple categorizations appear as coarse nets through which the subtleties of his position pass unaffected.