Bodies and Minds

Toward the end of the second century, the doctor Galen had come to know of Christians, A remark preserved in an Arabic source, If authentic, shows that he may have been prepared to be Impressed by them: “Their contempt of death is patent to us every day, and likewise their restraint In Intercourse. For they Include not only men but also women who refrain from Intercourse all through their lives” ¹ For reasons which Michel Foucault has elucidated with rare perceptlveness In his Le souci de soi, Galen and a small but articulate circle of his peers were prepared to admire those whose fine-tuned lives had come to include a measure of sexual austerity ²