A “sapientia cordis”: o quiasma de amor e conhecimento

Even though ‘wisdom of the heart’ is both a biblical and a spiritual theological theme, this study articulates certain positions taken by St. Thomas Aquinas with certain others taken from recent philosophical reflection. For Aristotle wisdom is the theoretical intellectual habit that considers things in the light of ‘ultimate causes’. ‘Wisdom of the heart’ is practical and affective but also theoretical, for it maintains a reference to ultimate causes, to ‘divine things’, approaching the original sense of Philo-sophia. An essential point is that which refers itself to its ‘subject’: is it reason, is it the heart, or both? The solutions vary, it being for each of us to choose. First to be addressed is knowledge, the activity of ‘the power to be rational’, secondly, love, the driving force of ‘active life’, and, lastly, the chiasma between the two of them, stressing the range and the limits of feeling and of the ‘affective life’. This chiasma is not a simple one, for there are ‘things more loved than known’ – above all God, maximally loveable and incomprehensible.