One remarkable
school of English mystics and religious philosophers, the Cambridge
Platonists, who wrote during the seventeenth century, founded upon him
their method and also their general attitude to philosophy.[344] They
were Christian neo-Platonists, who looked for spiritual allegories in
the Old and New Testaments, and combined the teachings of Jesus with
the emotional idealism of the Alexandrian interpreters of Plato. They
affirmed enthusiastically God's revelation to the universe and to
individual man through the Logos. Their imitation of Philo's
allegorism serves to mark the important place that he occupied in the
learned world during the seventeenth century; and supports, however
slightly, the suggestion that he influenced, directly or indirectly,
the supreme Jewish philosopher of the age, Baruch de Spinoza. That he
was well known in Holland at the time is shown in divers ways. He is
quoted by the famous jurist Grotius in his book which founded the
science of international law; he is quoted and criticised, as we have
seen, by Scaliger; and curiously enough, his name, "Philo-Judaeus," is
applied by Rembrandt to the portrait of his own father, now in the
Ferdinandeum at Innsbruck. It is tempting to conjecture that there was
a direct connection between the Jewish philosophers of the ancient and
the modern world.
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