Alan Turing Memorial: Sackville Gardens Manchester

There sits Alan. Jumping between two moments: one Real the other Ideal.
That Real moment – The sculptor has captured that final minute, as if it were a photograph. Alan is holding his apple, still fresh. Proof that he was quietly sitting, calmly waiting to take that first and final bite. So he wasn’t in some hormone-induced mania, feverish, tear-eyed and sweating, clutching then fumbling the fruit. No. Alan is sitting there, poised and collected – not since the long ancient past has an apple had so much weight, and never will one taste so light and unique.
An Ideal Moment, Suspended Across Time – The apple is still in his hand, forever connected to him. In his hand it will never become that brand, that disconnected icon of the computer recognisable to us all, but divorced from the one who bit it. In this statue that dislocation is healed. A reminder of the Apple origin - the origin of the computer.
Holding the fruit out, his offering is a contradiction to us: Alan has yet to bite the apple, but we know that he already has. It is an image of the Eden apple yet to be plucked from the tree, but with all the awareness of the consequences when we do.

Gender And Christianity 4: John 3

John Chapter 3 is a significant section of the New Testament and the message communicated by Christ to Nicodemus is essential to any approach to Christianity. However, what is often passed over in readings of this passage is its effect on our understanding of Christianity and gender.
In Hosea God is revealed to have female qualities – He is in the pains of labour, expecting to give birth to a reluctant Ephraim. In John 3, giving birth is once again the major theme, and once again it is a female function attributed to God. Christ tells Nicodemus “No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born from above.” Recognising the very female slant to what Christ is saying, but taking it too literally, Nicodemus responds “How can anyone be born after growing old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”. Nicodemus has confused the female quality of God to be physical rather than spiritual. Christ responds by affirming both the physical and spiritual, but emphasises the spiritual. “No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of spirit is spirit.” There is a physical birth – one of flesh, but there is also a spiritual birth. The latter is an expression of the female transcendent. But unlike Irigaray’s claim, it is not separate from the male transcendent. Here they are met in the same God. At this point it would be useful to bring the Trinity in the discussion – and where the female is placed in relation to the three persons of God (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit). This, however, would entail a whole new discussion.
The theme of birth – that female quality definitely attributable to God- has stretched across the Old Testament text of Hosea into the third chapter of John. There is, however, a major difference between the two. The difference pivots on violence. In Hosea the female, whether it is Ephraim-as-prostitute or God-as-expectant-mother, is the site of violence. Ephraim is threatened with violent punishment, while God faces death through Ephraim’s sin. In John 3, the violence has dissipated. In fact it is nowhere to be seen in the passage. The female is the giver of grace – the opportunity to be free from sin by being “born anew”. The female has become a site of redemption. This positive approach to God-as-female opens our eyes to the rest of the New Testament – where Christ treats women as social equals – a treatment at odds with his culture, where women are the first to communicate Christ’s resurrection – the core event of Christianity, and further on in the New Testament and the central role woman play in the early church.
This is in no way to pull back God’s male qualities. In John 3 Christ sums up his word in male terms, affirming himself as God’s Son: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him shall have eternal life”. God has both female and male qualities attributable to him, and like Irigarary explains there are male and female transcendents. We, however, have found both in the same transcendent – like the father in Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son.

Gender and Christianity 3: Hosea

From the outset of the book of Hosea the tribe of Ephraim, the hub of the northern Kingdom of Israel, is likened to a prostitute. Ephraim has effectively broken its covenant with the Lord by continually turning towards Baalism. For this reason Ephraim is referred to as a ‘whore’, looking elsewhere despite being in a sacred covenant. The prophet Hosea himself takes the prostitute Gomer as his wife in order to “live out” the relationship between the tribe of Ephraim and God. In the text the words of Hosea continually oscillate between the violent punishment that will be meted out on the figure of the prostitute and the divine forgiveness that is on offer. From the beginning of the text Ephraim takes on the female gender and becomes the site of both violence and grace.
However, a radical shift takes place towards the end of the text – a shift that reverses the gender and sex metaphors used by the prophet. In chapter 13 it slowly becomes apparent that God is being figured as female. The first line of chapter 13 verse 8 reads: “I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs”. God is being presented, through through metaphor, as female – as a mother. However it is verses 12-13 that are most significant:

Ephriam’s iniquity is bound up;
his sin is kept in store.
The pangs of childbirth come for him,
but he is an unwise son;
for at the proper time he does not
present himself
at the mouth of the womb.
(Hosea 13: 12-13)

In this passage the tribe of Ephriam ceases to be regarded as a female prostitute and is instead figured as a male, unborn son. Alongside this change in our understanding of the tribe of Ephraim, is a significant change in how we are to understand God. God has now taken on the female figure of the mother, expecting to give birth to her son. Through these two verses a new metaphorical image is presented in which the gender and sex roles have been swapped. God is the mother, the female, about to give birth. Ephraim is the male, a son who refuses to leave the womb, an “unwise son” who will prevent birth from taking place. Just as there was an overt violence in the previous chapters directed at the female figure, there is also an overt violence expressed in this passage. Whereas earlier it was directed at Ephraim-as-prostitute, it is now God-as-mother who is the site of violence. Ephraim’s self-destructive behaviour – it’s refusal to leave the womb, thus setting it on a trajectory to become stillborn, will eventually lead to the destruction not only of itself but also its mother – that is God. We have, presented before us, an ancient echo of the words of Nietzsche’s madman, with all the responsibility that it entails: “God is dead. We have killed him – you and I”. However, Nietzsche’s claim differs in that Hosea’s prophetic death will be realised in the crucifixion of Christ and the overcoming of death itself. Nietzsche’s death is a socio-political comment directed at modern society. What is important to us is that in this passage God is figured as a female. Not only in terms of gender – the culturally constructed notion of what female is, but also in terms of sex. God is giving birth and therefore performing an act that, biologically, only females can do. The book of Hosea is an expression of both the male and female located in a single transcendent. The female qualities of God apparent in this passage will become fundamentally important to our reading from the Gospels.

Gender And Christianity 2

Luce Irigaray opens the Foreword to her work Elemental Passions by writing:

Man is divided between two transcendencies: his mother’s and his God’s – whatever kind of God that may be. These two transcendencies are doubtless not unrelated but this is something that has been forgotten.

Although Irigaray is not necessarily speaking in the Christian context that we will take on, she does make an important claim that there are both female and male transcendies. The male transcendent being that of God while the female is that of a man’s mother. This may be a claim grounded in a Roman Catholic tradition where the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ, has her own very special place in the Religion. But perhaps this is stretching the background to her claim too far. Certainly, Irigarary claims that the female and male transcendencies are related, no matter how much we try to separate them. Importantly their relation, and in particular the role of the female, has largely been forgotten. In our investigation we will make a similar claim but with a slight difference - rather than regarding the male and female as two related but ultimately separate transcendencies, we will view the male and female as qualities of one transcendant – God the Father, which is specific to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Like the hands of the father in Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son we find two gender and sex qualities inseparably bound to the same person.