The sexuality is a good example on how some "functions" became unsacred. For many, Antiquity was already a mark on the changing patterns concerning sexuality and, later, Christianity became the privileged vehicle of this switch.

Paul Veyne (L’Histoire, nr 63, January 84) and Michel Foucault (in the very same magazine) stated that this changing can be observed long before Christianity. According to those authors, in Rome (centuries I and II), among Roman pagans, and before Christianity spread all over, there was already a so-called "Puritanism of virility”. Paul Veyne explains that Christianity gave a transcendental explanation, based on Theology and on “The Book” (Genesis interpretation and original sin, S. Paul and the Holy Fathers teachings). So, what was until then the behaviour of a minority, became a “normal” and “general” behaviour… or at least, the “preaching” about this behaviour. Christianity furnished a corpus of definitions, classifications, dualities, etc., to explain Puritanism. And it offered an exemplar society: monasticism. To the claims of a Roman pagan “cult”, Christians added a new and demanding motive: the End of the World proximity: “the time is brief”, so stated St Paul.