Is the central theme of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood Platonic?

Is Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise
Blood “Platonic”?  The answer to this question depends on how one defines
“Platonic.” Few commentators on O’Connor have discussed at any length any supposed
Platonism in the novel, although the matter has been discussed by Christina Bieber Lake
(see links below), who suggests that the novel questions Plato’s rigid distinction
between body and soul. Lake suggests that O’Connor, following St. Thomas Aquinas and
other Catholic philosophers, preferred an understanding of relations between body and
soul that was influenced by Aristotle.

On the other hand,
Anthony Di Rienzo, in his book on O’Connor titled American
Gargoyles, argues that O’Connor came to realize that Christian religious
faith

cannot
be portrayed as it is in Wise Blood — a grim yearning for the
unattainable, for a Platonic ideal so perfect that it is
otherworldly. And that means O’Connor must bring Christ down to earth, so to speak . . .
. (p. 29)

Two intelligent
critics, then, have seen Wise Blood as Platonic in one sense but as
non-Platonic in another. Everything depends on how one defines
“Platonic.”

In the broadest sense, O’Connor (and
Wise Blood) might be called Platonic if one associates Platonism
with a concern with ideals that transcend the merely material, the merely worldly. 
O’Connor, of course, would have been first and foremost a Christian
Platonist: Christianity was far more important to her than Plato was. To the
extent that Wise Blood implies that we should look beyond the world
and the flesh to something higher and more transcendent, the book might be called
“Platonist” in a very general sense.

Interestingly, in her
published letters (The Habit of Being), O’Connor mentions Plato
just once and in passing, whereas in other letters she explicitly identifies her
thinking as Aristotelian and defends Aristotle from criticism (p. 104). In a
particularly relevant passage, she jokingly says,

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Everybody who has read Wise
Blood thinks I’m a hillbilly nihilist, whereas I would like to create the
impression over the television [in an interview] that I’m a hillbilly Thomist, but I
will probably not be able to think of anything to say to Mr. Harvey Breit [the
interviewer] but “Huh?” and “Ah dunno.” (p.
81).

Perhaps the most
sensible thing to say, in response to this question, is that O’Connor, in Wise
Blood and elsewhere, was an extremely committed Roman Catholic
Christian.