Early Christianity uniquely valued pain where Stoicism and medicine 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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Christianity’s valuation of pain broke from Stoic and Galenic frameworks — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 421; Christianity uniquely revalued suffering as valuable where antiquity did not; Platonic dualism naturally generated an ascetic morality that Christianity partially adopted — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 611 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Christianity’s valuation of pain broke from Stoic and Galenic frameworks #corroborates (0.97) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 421
• Christianity uniquely revalued suffering as valuable where antiquity did not #corroborates (0.95)
• Pain can be engaged through learned structuration rather than given meaning #complicates (0.74)