Pascal, the Pensées, and the figure of the lamb: A physiognomy

Abstract

The interest in the Pensées comes from the contradictory nature of Pascal's work as being exemplary of a text in the general sense given the term due to its resistance to a unified, closed interpretation and where there exists, instead, a continual play of reversals. The Pensées is a work of instruction through contradiction where the role of physiognomy in the understanding of sentiment and truth needs to be examined. When the seventeenth-century French scientist, mathematician, and thinker Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) elaborates a method for resolving contradictions between the Old and New Testaments, he discusses Old Testament figures of Christ in terms of the human body. While positing a certain equivalence between the two testaments and that between the body and the soul, the metaphors of this spiritual exegesis become paradoxically more physical. In the Scriptures, one seeks the figure of the Author, of the Christian God, and from the body of Christ one can uncover it. To elucidate Pascal's understanding of the body of Christ, one will consider certain aspects of physiognomics operative in the seventeenth century, namely those outlined by Giovanni Battista della Porta in his De humana physiognomonia (1586).