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Philo was the first to formulate the problem of the reconciliation of faith and reason, which was to dominate the history of philosophy until René Descartes and Benedict de Spinoza shifted the focus to rational thought in the seventeenth century. Having been born approximately two decades before Jesus and having died approximately two decades after Jesus, he is important to an understanding of the spiritual crisis of the first century. While his influence on Jewish thought was negligible until modern times, the history of Christian philosophy begins not with a Christian but with Philo, a Jew; he is also a crucial link in the development of European culture from Platonism and Stoicism to Christianity. His influence on the church fathers Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, and Gregory of Nyssa of the third and fourth centuries A.D. is truly profound. Some symbolic recognition of the Christian debt to Philo is revealed in the legend quoted by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History (circa A.D.
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