Of egregores and angels

A little while back, Steve commented on a 'Powers' posting of mine to link the approach I tend to take to the concept of egregores. I think it could be helpful.Notes from underground: Of egregores and angels

The post Steve pointed me back to raises interesting questions and issues. I think part of my response is to say that I believe at this point that we should think of these entities as emergent and therefore as also defined by their 'worldly' forms. For me the parallel is in anthropology: just as mind and soul are emergent properties of our physical arrangement (I know that some will want to disagree with this, but I think it perfectly consonant both with Hebrew wholism and contemporary science and probably a modified Aristotelianism/Thomism) so are the Powers emergent from human institutions.

One of Steve's interlocutors raises the question of moral responsibility. I think that is where it gets interesting: because it seems that responsibility is 'smeary'. Actually we know this from experience. The thing is to recall that we remain individually responsible for ourselves even while we may participate in the Powers to varying degrees. Part of the point, it seems to me, of Paul's forceful language about the Powers is to make sure that Christians realise that we do not need to be subject to them; we can resist and we remain/become, therefore, moral agents even embedded in a socially-constructed reality. The aim here, it seems to me is to prevent the Powers (egregors) from subsuming human beings totally or to make sure we don't give ourselves over to them (a kind of fascism, I suppose). The Sabbath was made for humans not humans for the Sabbath; so with the Powers.

The interesting thing beyond this with regard to sin is that we would do well, I think, to recognise that part of the mechanism for the emergence of the Powers from human corporisations is our mimetic nature. That is we are 'programmed' to learn from one another and that learning is kicked off by imitative ('mimetic') behaviour even as babes in arms (and probably earlier). I have a hunch that this fact enables us to see a mechanism for human participation in the fall which isn't prey to the difficulties presented by, for example, Augustinian accounts of original sin. We have an account which does justice both to the 'given-ness' and 'participation in something prior to us' of sin and also to personal responsibility.