Wisdom and Faith: A Basic Anthropological Difference in the view of Thomas Aquinas and Descartes

In the wisdom-faith relation debate, as one of the most important issues in theology, Thomas Aquinas, the renowned Christian rhetoric of the middle Ages, intellectually claims that Wisdom is independent and even superior to faith. In the Modern Cartesian Intellectualism, there is nothing superior to the wisdom, put differently; things which can’t be recognized through logic can’t be considered as wisdom. Although, Thomas Aquinas and Descartes have openly separated wisdom and faith in attaining intellectualism, yet they don’t see any contradictions between the two, rather they maintain a fundamental harmony between them. The present study, taking into consideration the dominance and superiority of will over wisdom extrapolated in the anthropology of Descartes and Thomas, analyses the relativity of faith and wisdom based on their understanding of human being.