A Glance at Allama Tabatabai and St. Augustine's Views on Faith and Reason

As to the issue of faith and reason, Allama Tabatabai holds that reason is prior tofaith and thus intellectual reasoning has the authority over faith; he therefore goes freely to establish religious doctrines by reason. Accordingly, he believes that it is wrong to believe in the first place and then go after proof. On the contrary, faith has an element of knowledge belonging to all religious doctrines which are hence speculative rather than self-evident.Augustine, nonetheless, gives the priority to the faith considering understanding as a reward for one’s faith; he insists that faith is the necessary prerequisite for understanding so that there will be no understanding if there is no faith. In the course of justification of religious propositions, Augustine makes use of the intellect and thus tries to prove the existence of God by means of intellectual reasoning. He is known as a moderate fideist.The shared point of the two thinkers is that both faith and reason are means or ways to the truth, none of them alone can lead man to happiness.