I’d leave out the “a,” though.

You can say, “With his priestly appearance and murderous soul, he was a walking contradiction.”

To use your framework, one might say: with his priestly appearance and the snarl on his face . . . (these would both be observable).

Another example might be: He presented such a contradiction: the well-cut business suit and the tatoos on his knuckles.

Of course, you don’t have to use “contradiction” in its sort of poetic (figurative) sense. You can use it straightforwardly (connotatively): “His second answer was a straightforward contradiction of his first.”

Hope that helps. I always enjoy helping people who tried on their own first!

The DENOTATION or dictionary definition of contradiction as used in this sentence is “a statement or proposition that contradicts or denies another or itself and is logically incongruous. ”

So it is a contradiction for a person to have both a priestly appearance and a murderous soul.

Its use is figurative in that a person is compared metaphorically to a contradiction (he was a contradiction.)

A metaphor is a figure of speech (thus the figurative use of the word.)