Cacciatori incauti e confessori ubriachi. Uso degli esempi, volontà e valore morale degli atti esteriori in Ugolino di Orvieto (+1373)

When Hugolinus de Urbe Veteri asks in his commentary on the Sentences (1348-1349) whether an external act can aggravate the sin of the will, he is asking a question that goes back to the Ethics of Petrus Abelard, where we find, as is well known, the position of the problem of the moral relationship between the consensus of the will and the external act; but this problem is also present in the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus, where sin is basically a question concerning the human will and only secondarily a question of external actions. For Giles of Rome, the first Master of the Augustinian Order, sin is also a question of the will. Nevertheless, we find some interesting clarifications: for instansce, he speaks of the possibility that a bad external act can aggravate the sin of the will, and of various degrees of intensio in the same will. The Augustinian Gregory of Rimini, in the middle of the XIVth century, claims on the contrary that external acts are sins apart from sins of the will; but after that he seems to adhere more closely to the traditional doctrine. Hugolin, in his discussion against Gregory, not only develops a fuller doctrine of the various ways or levels in which we can view the will and its relation to external actions, but he does so by unusually giving many moral examples that are quite sophisticated and refined.