Medieval polemicists could not distinguish authoritative doctrine from local superstition

Evidence

San Pedro pointed out to them that this belief contradicted the idea of the angel of death who wrote the eternal destiny of each man to Heaven or Hell from the beginning. This further illustrates the weakness of his method, since he here asserts a contradiction between a generally accepted doctrine and a local superstition; on the other hand, we should remember that he may not have had the means to distinguish the authority of the one from that of the other. He must have known, however, that there was no written authority for the one, even of such doubtful validity (from the modern point of view) as the Liber Scalae. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 2228

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s thread on how ‘Islam’ gets flattened and constructed by external observers like Aziz and Razack describe — the epistemological gap between what a tradition actually teaches and what its critics can perceive.