Abstract

While a habitus can be described as a disposition towards a certain type of act, such a definition is not sufficient to encompass the diversity of uses the medieval thinkers made of this concept. It is the aim of this paper to examine the habitus of faith in the voluntarist Franciscan tradition in order to illustrate several of its functions and how these varied from author to author. Studying how the habitus of faith works for Bonaventure, Peter John Olivi and John Duns Scotus allows us to examine different takes on these functions and illustrates the variety of possible positions even within a tradition that emphasizes the freedom and agency of the moral subject above all. We will highlight three different capacities a habitus can grant: the capacity to pick out its proper objects, in the present case, the objects of faith; the capacity to elicit certain acts that without it would not have been possible or at least that would not have had the moral value the habitus grants them; the capacity to unite several powers in the performance of a given act.