Abstract

The recent interest in virtue ethics and moral psychology has tended to focus on the theories of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, including their emphasis on the role of intellect and prudence in defining the virtues. There are, however, other strands in the history of virtue ethics, including a more "voluntaristic" strand developed by Augustine of Hippo, who defined virtue in terms of properly ordered will and love. This dissertation examines an important figure in the development of the Augustinian approach to virtue and moral psychology, namely, Bonaventure , and his intellectual debt to Augustine. ;This dissertation focuses on a particular conception of twofold order that Bonaventure owes to Augustine. I argue that this twofold account of order---order as the relationship of individual elements to each other as a unity and the order of things toward an end ---largely accounts for both Augustine's and Bonaventure's moral emphasis on the will and love. On the one hand, Bonaventure adopts from Augustine a metaphysical use of order that relates all things to each other in a hierarchical scheme. On the other, from Augustine, Bonaventure also adopts a psychological use of order that makes the will the principal psychological mover and love its principal movement. I show that for both Augustine and Bonaventure, love, as determined by the will, is the human "weight," the human "final cause," what inclines and orders a human being toward soem ultimate end or place of rest. This love is good when it is ordered toward the appropriate end, which is itself determined by the hierarchical order of things in relation to each other. It is the possibility of twofold disorder---the disorder of love that results in a disorder of things in relation to each other---that introduces evil and sin as moral problems. For both Augustine and Bonaventure, then, virtue is not determined by the intellect, but instead by the will and love: virtue is love properly ordered to God