The gladiator in the chapel

Russell Crowe gets the royal treatment whenever he visits Italy. He described the phenomenon on the Joe Rogan podcast. Twenty-five years after his Oscar-winning performance in the movie Gladiator, Crowe says the people of Italy still greet him like a king, inviting him to private museum tours and affectionately calling him “Massimo” (in a nod to his character, Maximus).

Things were different the first time he visited the Sistine Chapel, however. Crowe told Rogan it was 1991, years before he filmed Gladiator. When he found himself under Michelangelo’s breathtaking ceiling fresco for the first time, he was “offended.”

“It was so overwhelming it shocked me,” the actor said. “And I thought, man, that would trick a lot of people. That would trick a lot of people if they walked in and saw all that beauty, and they’d go, ‘well these guys must have a direct connection to [God]. These are the guys I should hang with.’”

This is a strange admission, but a human one. Crowe was confronted with beauty so extreme, it sent him scrambling for an explanation. How was this possible? In search of the answer, his mind went directly to exploitation. Of course those early Christian ‘zealots’ were able to amass power over so many people back then, he reasoned. Look how convincing their magic!

Clearly Crowe had brought some personal baggage with him on that visit—some real or perceived slight by Christians he knew, or the Church generally, or the bold truth claims of Christianity itself. It’s uncomfortable to be confronted with a worldview that makes your own look inadequate or empty or wrong.

Whatever his pathway to this reaction, it was a pity Crowe couldn’t simply bask in the beauty of Michelangelo’s masterpiece. It was a pity, but it wasn’t exactly irrational. There are two rational reactions to awesome beauty: exultation and revulsion. Russell Crowe was not a Christian when he first saw the Sistine Chapel, and so it repulsed him.

He surely wasn’t the first. This story started back in 1508, when Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the Word of God on the Sistine Chapel walls. The work begins in Genesis, moving through the ages of Noah and Moses to the Prophets, leading to the final return of Jesus to “judge the living and the dead.” The gorgeous colors, the astounding detail of each body, the sheer size and drama of the artwork are staggeringly beautiful. But the story is particularly so. This is us needing saved and then being saved, in vibrant and living color.

Not everybody loves this story, though. Paul told the Corinthians the gospel is “folly” to “those who are perishing;” although something probably gets a little lost in translation there, because ‘folly’ does not seem strong enough a word. People who reject Jesus don’t necessarily think the gospel is dumb. Satan doesn’t merely scoff, like a cynic, at goodness. He hates it. He cannot stomach it.

In fact, Russell Crowe’s offense at the Sistine Chapel calls to mind two similar, much older stories.

In 1972, nearby in Vatican City, a man named Laszlo Toth, filled with rage, charged at another of Michealangelo’s works: the Pieta, the exquisite marble sculpture of Mary holding the slain body of Jesus which now sits inside St. Peter’s Basilica. Toth attacked the sculpture with a hammer, breaking it in several parts, and screaming that he was “Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.”

Almost two-thousand years earlier, Jesus was beginning his ministry in a synagogue in Capernaum. While he began teaching, a man possessed by a demon screamed at him in anger. “What are you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” (Mark 1: 24).

Not everyone wants to be saved. Or maybe not everyone wants to need saving. The gospel is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened, and people who hate it—and who thereby love evil—are helplessly compelled to hate beauty, whether in the form of a sculpture, a painting, or the Word of God incarnate.

When Russell Crowe told this story to Joe Rogan, he actually came across quite charming. He seemed sheepish at the memory and spoke about his return to the Sistine Chapel later in his life with awe and reverence. And while his initial revulsion makes biblical sense, it’s lovely that Rogan pointed out the flaw in the rest of his logic: After Crowe accused the early Christians of using the art to hoodwink the masses into believing the Church had a direct connection to God, Rogan countered, “But they probably do. Which is how they made it.”

As Christians, beauty is our heritage. We should check in, every once in a while, on our reactions to it—as a kind of spiritual temperature-taking. Does it repulse us? Or does it bring us to our knees?