Gambling and Grace: Pascal, Cervantes, and Caravaggio
April 13, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Sonia Velazquez
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature
Indiana University
The early modern period inherited a tradition of Biblical commentary, legal documents, and artistic representations that imagined the gambler as blind to spiritual matters. And yet, The Cardsharps (1594) a painting by Caravaggio, Miguel de Cervantes’ only hagiographic drama El rufían dichoso [Fortunate ruffian] (1615) and perhaps most famously, Blaise Pascal’s so-called “Wager” all use gambling as a trope for thinking through the vagaries of conversion and salvation. This paper will examine these examples as they re-imagine conversion as the matter of a quiet moment, not the force of dogma or the enchantment of spectacle; it is a matter of recognition rather than revelation, of calculation but also of surprise.
Sponsored by Catholic Studies.
Date posted
Jun 12, 2020
Date updated
Sep 25, 2020