Medieval Christians schematized Judaism, Islam and Christianity into Fortune, Nature and Grace

Evidence

William of Auvergne reports two interesting comparisons of the three revealed religions that were current in his own day among people reputed sapientes in mundo. One of these views distinguished Fortune, Nature and Grace. The religion of the Hebrews was that of Fortune, which the Jews might be said to worship, since their reason for holding their religion was that it brought them temporal prosperity. Muslim religion was the religion of Nature, because it contained few requirements; nature here meant corrupt nature, and Muslims indulged carnal delights for which they thirsted. The Christian religion was that of Grace. … William discarded this scheme as based on inadequate study of the religions concerned. Other people he quoted as saying that the Hebrew nation lived under Saturn, whose sign was their avarice, pertinacity and hardness, and whose appropriate day was Saturday, the day they kept holy. The Muslims lived under Venus, kept her day holy, and were much given to venery. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1054

Categorization

• XREF: The triadic schematization of Jew as Fortune, Muslim as Nature, Christian as Grace prefigures how the vault’s Islamophobia thread traces constitutive-outsider construction — echoes Anidjar’s genealogy of Jew/Arab as Christianity’s internal enemies.
• SEED: A comparative-schemas article could trace how pseudo-astrological and three-‘law’ comparative frameworks persisted from medieval polemic into modern constructions.