This book examines, within the framework of cultural history, the change of "paradigm" regarding the perceptions and uses of the human body during its transition from Roman to Byzantine culture as a means to achieve Christian salvation, achievable through the combination of self-compulsive/self-regulatory and ascetic practices. This interpretive-explanatory schema of incorporating God, which will determine the identity of Byzantine culture, was shaped in the early Christian centuries. The self-compulsive and ascetic practices of managing the Christian body not only expanded the boundaries of the human body, but also overturned long-established racial and authoritarian mechanisms, giving access to the standards of male masculinity and to Christian women martyrs and ascetics.

"[...] Syrian asceticism, with its extreme way of signifying corporeality that it adopted, which could, under different climatic conditions, prove fatal for its carrier's survival, shaped new cultural standards for human nature. The ascetics emerged as the inverted "followers of Dionysus", to borrow a successful formulation by Friedrich Nietzsche, who, by leaving urban centers and taking refuge in the desert, became living examples of animal nature, with the difference that the mystical renunciation of the self in them was no longer associated with Dionysian intoxication, but with the self-compulsive subjugation of impulses".