Peter Ceffons (fl. 1348-1353) on the moral value of external acts

The Cistercian monk Peter Ceffons, in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, devotes the first question of the fourth book to the issue of whether the external act adds anything to the moral value of the interior act of the will from which it derives. This problem is important especially in Peter Abelard’s Scito te ipsum, but it was also present in the Augustinian tradition of the twelfth century and appears later at times in the exegetical tradition of the Lombardian Sentences, as in this case. Through a close familiarity with the views held by other well-known masters of the first half of the fourteenth century, Peter demonstrates a fundamentally traditional Augustinian approach, in which good and evil in ethics are certainly rooted in the interior act of the will and not in exterior deeds. However, Peter carefully refines his position with a much more pronounced willingness to admit that exterior deeds have (or can have) a certain ethical relevance, either in themselves or in their consequences, a notable attention to the real and concrete circumstances in which the exterior act is carried out, and an emphasis that a correct moral evaluation must primarily concern not single exterior deeds but their relation to the habits and dispositions the will assumes over time.