Christianity’s valuation of pain broke from Stoic and Galenic frameworks

Evidence

In the world of late antiquity, the Christian community was positively oriented (as the ancient world had not been) to sickness and human suffering. Where sickness could not be healed, Christians insisted that pain could be understood as valuable. This was different from two traditions that were more or less contemporaneous with the early Christian persecutions related in the martyrologies: Stoic moral philosophy (with its emphasis on self-mastery, its denial of externals such as suffering), and Galenic medicine (that regarded pain as a bodily condition subject to appropriate technical intervention). — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 421

Categorization

• XREF: The Christian investment in pain’s value is a historical root of the very categories Asad shows governing ‘religion’ — relevant to why Christianity reads as default while Islam reads as merely premodern.