As Southern Israelite has shown, Karl Marx's mentor, Hegel, incorporated into his philosophy the three age prophecy of neoplatonic mystic Joachim of Fiore, which is based on the Trinity and subsequently became integral to the foundation of communism.
Let's also recall that Marx had been under the tutelage of Jesuit priest Peter Beckx, according to Otto Von Bismark in his North German Gazette:
“Bismarck complained in his North German Gazette that I was in league with Father Beck, the leader of the Jesuit movement, and that we were keeping the socialist movement in such a condition that he could do nothing with it.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/media/marx/79_01_05.htm
As seen, Marx makes no attempt to deny that Bismark's allegations were true. Marx had been educated by the Jesuits in his youth, and the Jesuits following in the neoplatonic, ascetic monastic lineage were the first ones to perfect a communist system of governance on their Paraguayan reductions between the 1600-1800s. For more information on that, see my write-up on the Jesuit/monastic origins of communism.
Now how many have heard of Meister Eckhart, the monastic Catholic mystic from Germany who lived shortly after Joachim of Fiore? According to wiki, he was one of the most important neoplatonists of the middle ages:
>Eckhart was one of the most influential 13th-century Christian Neoplatonists in his day, and remained widely read in the later Middle Ages.[26]
The Alumbrados which has been described as a Spanish Illuminati sect and precursor to the Jesuits, was a society rooted in the teachings of Eckhart, according to a scholar named Richard Woods in his book Christian Spirituality (also puts quite the wrench in the neo-Nazi position of the Alumbrados being Judaic to support their Jewish Loyola hypothesis):
Apparently Hegel was influenced by Eckhart and disciples of Eckhart including von Baader and Jakob Boehme. A member of the Bavarian Illuminati, the freemason Franz Xaver von Baader, was heavily influenced by Eckhart, and saw himself as the spiritual heir of Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas. From David Livingstone's book Transhumanism:
Jakob Boehme was influenced by Eckhart according to the book Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, published by Yale University Press; it also states Hegel and numerous other philosophers were influenced by Eckhart:
More on Boehme's influences and neoplatonic alchemical movements which he influenced from wikipedia:
Böhme's writing shows the influence of Neoplatonist and alchemical[19] writers such as Paracelsus, while remaining firmly within a Christian tradition. He has in turn greatly influenced many anti-authoritarian and mystical movements, such as Radical Pietism[20][21][22][23][24][25] (including the Ephrata Cloister[26] and Society of the Woman in the Wilderness), the Religious Society of Friends, the Philadelphians, the Gichtelians, the Harmony Society, the Zoarite Separatists, Rosicrucianism, Martinism and Christian theosophy. Böhme's disciple and mentor, the Liegnitz physician Balthasar Walther, who had travelled to the Holy Land in search of magical, kabbalistic and alchemical wisdom, also introduced kabbalistic ideas into Böhme's thought.[27]
Cyril O'Regan, a professor of Theology at Notre Dame, lists Ekhart, Joachim of Fiore and Bohme as primary influencers of Hegel:
Eckhart's work went into obscurity from between the sixteenth and nineteen centuries, which could account for some of the air of secrecy around the beliefs of these groups during their times.
Some quotes of interest relating to the neoplatonic influence of Eckhart from wiki:
Eckhart's most famous single quote, "The Eye with which I see God is the same Eye with which God sees me", is commonly cited by thinkers within neopaganism and ultimatist Buddhism as a point of contact between these traditions and Christian mysticism.
Theology
In Eckhart's vision, God is primarily fecund. Out of overabundance of love the fertile God gives birth to the Son, the Word in all of us. Clearly,[e] this is rooted in the Neoplatonic notion of "ebullience; boiling over" of the One that cannot hold back its abundance of Being. Eckhart had imagined the creation not as a "compulsory" overflowing (a metaphor based on a common hydrodynamic picture), but as the free act of will of the triune nature of Deity (refer Trinitarianism).
Another bold assertion is Eckhart's distinction between God and Godhead (Gottheit in German, meaning Godhood or Godliness, state of being God). These notions had been present in Pseudo-Dionysius's writings and John the Scot's De divisione naturae, but Eckhart, with characteristic vigor and audacity, reshaped the germinal metaphors into profound images of polarity between the Unmanifest and Manifest Absolute.
Contemplative method
John Orme Mills notes that Eckhart did not "leave us a guide to the spiritual life like St Bonaventure’s Itinerarium – the Journey of the Soul," but that his ideas on this have to be condensed from his "couple of very short books on suffering and detachment" and sermons.[25] According to Mills, Eckhart's comments on prayer are only about contemplative prayer "detachment."[25]
Theologia Germanica and the Reformation
It has been suspected that his practical communication of the mystical path is behind the influential 14th-century "anonymous" Theologia Germanica, which was disseminated after his disappearance. According to the medieval introduction of the document, its author was an unnamed member of the Teutonic Order of Knights living in Frankfurt.[citation needed]
The lack of imprimatur from the Church and anonymity of the author of the Theologia Germanica did not lessen its influence for the next two centuries – including Martin Luther at the peak of public and clerical resistance to Catholic indulgences – and was viewed by some historians of the early 20th century as pivotal in provoking Luther's actions and the subsequent Protestant Reformation.[citation needed]
The following quote from the Theologia Germanica depicts the conflict between worldly and ecclesiastical affairs:[citation needed]
"The two eyes of the soul of man cannot both perform their work at once: but if the soul shall see with the right eye into eternity, then the left eye must close itself and refrain from working, and be as though it were dead. For if the left eye be fulfilling its office toward outward things, that is holding converse with time and the creatures; then must the right eye be hindered in its working; that is, in its contemplation. Therefore, whosoever will have the one must let the other go; for 'no man can serve two masters.'"[30]
So Eckhart is hugely, maybe even primarily influential, to neoplatonic thought in modern, enlightenment, and medieval eras.
Now I have found some support to show Meister Eckhart may have been one of the most important figures in the development of masonry. And we already know from Eckhart's influence on the Alumbrados that the Jesuits were compatible with Eckhart's neoplatonism, so when the Jesuits took over masonry later in the eighteenth century they were already familiar with the basis for the craft, thus more easily enabling the takeover.
Firstly, I had no idea that Mackey was so upfront in his Encyclopedia of Freemasonry when I learned he wrote "Much of the symbolic teaching of the advanced Degrees Of Freemasonry has been derived from the school of the Neoplatonists."
Also bear in mind that the idea of ecclesiastic hierarchy was based on neoplatonism. This is where the degree hierarchy of freemasonry comes from.
Quoting Southern Israelite's book Conquering the Verbal Sorcery of Trinitarianism, pg. 135:
Pseudo Dionysius’ Ecclesiology in his Celestial Hierarchies were designed right off of
Neoplatonism. In Dionysius’ 8th Letter he forbids that Deacons correct priests. He says that “even
if disorder and confusion should undermine the most divine ordinances and regulations that still
gives no right even on God’s behalf to overturn the order which God has himself established.”177
Rorem mentions on page 20 of his Pseudo-Dionysius, commenting on Letter 8
>>“For Dionysius authority and revelation flowed from God down through the angelic
beings to the Hierarchs through them it continued down to the priests and to the
deacons and finally to the various groups of laity...this pyramid was symbolized in
the positions they occupied during the communion service”.
Rorem points out on page 32 that Bonaventure gave the Pope of Rome the highest place
of authority as “a natural extrapolation of Dionysian principles.” On page 93 Rorem points out
that Dionysius’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchies posited the Hierarchy as the means of salvation. Ergo,
outside the Hierarchy there is not salvation. On page 92 Rorem explains that in Dionysius’
Ecclesiastical Hierarchies the Biblical and Liturgical symbols that men are confronted with in this
life are anagogical symbols to aid in assent through the Hierarchies. On page 94-95 Rorem explains
Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchies and mentions that the meanings of the Liturgical Symbols are to
remain secret from the common man but revealed only to “sacred initiators”; pace Pike’s
Freemasonry. He mentions that man’s knowledge is something accommodated and therefore, this
accommodation is why man needs a Hierarchical authority to interpret the truth for him.
Ilmārs Latkovskis, a 33° Latvian mason, journalist, publicist and politician writing for The Supreme Council 33° for Latvia of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, says of Eckhart's influence on Masonry and Alchemy:
Up to the end of the Middle Ages, Western or, Christian mystic at its root is unites with Eastern spiritual traditions. Christian visionaries Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and Meister Eckhart was strongly influent from the East. The Freemasonry borrows much from these men.
Meister Echkart is the central figure. He is the most prominent representative of Christian mysticism. He has borrowed much of the Eastern teachings. He has had a very significant effect on the Alchemist's and Freemasonry.
http://aasr.lv/us/essays/the-spiritual-value-east-and-west-synergy
Eckhart is indeed described as being the ultimate ecumenist, which is consistent with Freemasonry's ecumenical nature, admitting into its ranks anyone who professes a belief in God. Excerpt of Meister Eckhart: A Mysitc-Warrior for our Times on Eckhart's broad and deep ecumenism:
It is also interesting how the anglicized version of Meister Ekhart is "Master Eckhart" (as in Master mason, perhaps?) and how medieval masonry was just starting to take root during Ekhart's time (sources say he could have been born as early as 1250). Though there probably wasn't much overlap between Eckhart and medieval masonry when he lived due to him being from Germany while the masons existed in England, it helps knowing that the church was a primary employer of the masons and the first known masonic workshops and guilds operated from Abbeys and Cathedrals:
The historical record shows two levels of organisation in medieval masonry, the lodge and the "guild". The original use of the word lodge indicates a workshop erected on the site of a major work, the first mention being Vale Royal Abbey in 1278. Later, it gained the secondary meaning of the community of masons in a particular place. The earliest surviving records of these are the laws and ordinances of the lodge at York Minster in 1352.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Freemasonry#From_the_Middle_Ages_to_the_Reformation
Indeed, The Real History Behind the Templars by Sharan Newman emphasizes that the majority of neoplatonism was infused into masonry with its revival in the 18th century, no doubt thanks to the works of Eckhartian disciple Jakob Boehme:
This is validated by Jesuit priest, David J. Collins, who admits in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West that this was the case, especially with the mainland European Scottish Rite masonry - that it can trace its influence to the Eckhartian Jakob Boehme:
Mackey, too, admits the influence of Boehme on the masonic lodges of Russia:
By the way, who was this man Admiral Pleshcheyeff? We read he was a Russian Naval officer that died in 1802:
What is significant about this is that in 1802, the Jesuits convinced then Emperor Paul to restore freemasonry into the Russian Empire, as is found in A History of Political and Religious Persecutions by F. Garrido and C.B Cayley Vol II on pg. 334:
In the Russian empire, the Emperor Paul first prohibited Freemasonry in 1797. The Jesuits, who had returned to the country in 1802, procured a revocation of this edict.
So it is not a surprise that we see the Jesuits in direct alignment with the Eckhartian Russian masons, and how with their influence over the Russian Emperor, the Jesuits found it beneficial to restore the masons in that Empire, or how they interjected themselves into the lodges of the mainland European Scottish Rite Masons, as attested by John Robison.
Suffice to say, these secret societies are based on neoplatonism which is a basis of the monkish orders.