Christianity uniquely revalued suffering as valuable where antiquity did not

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on silencing/subjectivity — a community that treats pain as valuable rather than to-be-eliminated recasts the body’s relation to agency.

Related

• Christianity’s valuation of pain broke from Stoic and Galenic frameworks (similarity 0.93)
• Secular conscience cannot make positive sense of suffering as Christianity once did (similarity 0.82)
• Pain can function as an active force, not merely passivity. (similarity 0.81)
• Pain can be agentive rather than merely a passive state (similarity 0.79)
• Inflicted pain can be embraced and transformed by its recipients into something else. (similarity 0.79)
• Secularization of pain shifted attention from consoling relationships to detached investigation (similarity 0.79)
• Pain is a mode of living a relationship, not merely a passive bodily state. (similarity 0.78)
• Secularization of pain reflects changed sensibilities, not mere disenchantment (similarity 0.78)
• Punitive pain can be actively embraced and re-signified by its recipients (similarity 0.78)