ABSTRACT
In 1971 Michel Foucault published an essay on Nietzsche's conception of 'genealogy' and later began to use the term 'genealogy' to describe some of his own work. The genealogy reveals Christian morality to arise from the historically contingent conjunction of a large number of such separate series of processes that ramify the further back one goes and present no obvious or natural single stopping place that could be designated 'the origin'. The history of Christianity, then, is a history of successive attempts on the part of a variety of different 'wills' to take control of and reinterpret a complex of habits, feelings, ways of perceiving and acting, thereby imposing on this complex a 'meaning'. Christianity at a given point in time will be a 'synthesis' of the various different 'meanings' imposed on it in the past and which have succeeded in remaining embedded in Christian feeling, forms of action and belief, etc.
