Some years ago, an article called Is Google Making Us Stupid, ended with a quote from the

playwright director Richard Foreman, who, as far as I can tell, would be quite a stranger

among Thomas. But he observed, I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal

was the complex, dense,

and cathedral-like structure of the highly educated and articulate personality.

But he continues, we're becoming pancake people, spread wide and thin.

The discussions about the rebuilding of Notre Dame

and many of the proposals for its reconstruction

demonstrate sharply Foreman's assertion

that we're becoming a pancake people

and have lost any sense of the cathedral-like structure

of the human person.

So in this paper, I propose that in order to consider the

architecture of any cathedral, indeed of any church, including that of Notre Dame, and what

makes it beautiful, it is necessary first to understand the cathedral-like structure of the human

person. Whereas Foreman explains the human person in terms of the cathedral,

this only makes sense if we first understand the cathedral in terms of the human person.

As some of the proposals for the rebuilding of Notre Dame make clear,

we cannot presume agreement, as Foreman does,

that a cathedral should be a dense and complex that is a beautiful structure. But I will suggest if we see the complexity and beauty

of the human interior, it will become clearer why a church is beautiful and why it should

manifest that beauty visibly.

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