It is a little-known fact that one worker died while building St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan during its construction from 1858-78.

At least, there is only one that is documented. And I venture to observe it as “little-known” because its only record is in the “NOTES AND CLIPPINGS” section, page 376, of “The American Architect and Building News,” 1876: a trampled footnote in the history of a storied monument.

“Notwithstanding the very dangerous character of the work done at such a height from the ground, only one life has been lost so far,” the dispatch reads. “And that was due to the carelessness of the man killed.”

I was thinking about this man, conjuring the details of his self-culpable demise, as I sat in the pews of St. Patrick’s Cathedral last Wednesday night. It seemed overwhelmingly likely that he had fallen from some great height: a slip, twist, fall from the rickety wood scaffoldings, maybe while carving one of those foliate bosses into the ceiling. Was he reckless or just taking on the necessary risks of the task? I stared at those floral sculptings until I could feel the empty-gut plummet.

I was at St. Patrick’s for a press showing of “LUMINISCENCE,” a 360-degree light show and concert that debuted in the cathedral on Sept. 30 and plays through Nov. 15.

During a 45-minute performance from the “LUMINISCENCE” orchestra and a live choir, every inch of wall, column and ceiling inside St. Patrick’s is covered with belts of colorful light and vividly animated projections. The recorded voice of Jonathan Roumie, who stars as Jesus in the critically acclaimed television series “The Chosen,” booms in from above to narrate the building’s history.

The resulting experience is impressive—but also frivolous, in approximately equal measure.

The orchestra and choir are a marvel in their own right. Their sound is tender and full-bodied, moving in lockstep with the accompanying visuals. 

And as for those visuals, they are impressively precise. The projected designs, sketched and hand-painted for St. Patrick’s specifically before being animated by a team of motion designers, map perfectly onto each panel, each divet, and the slightest of contours with exactitude.

But the audience is not really here for a concert, and they certainly are not here to inspect the show’s visual engineering. “LUMINISCENCE” promises an experience of rapture.

There are moments when it induces something close to awe: a projection rolling up the columns offers the illusion that the church is rapidly generating from the ground up; sheets of bright color turn the walls into full mosaic; a ribbon of light unfurls across the ceiling and opens the azure heavens above. It is an imminently enjoyable show, which makes it more difficult to articulate what about it is unsatisfying.

It seems sanctimonious to say “LUMINISCENCE” is a bit gaudy: of course it is. That the eager showmanship of a digital art production might fall one, two, three notches below high art—that “digital” might tower over “art”—seems too obvious a point to make. But maybe it is not.

Taken on the word of its own marketing, “LUMINISCENCE” promises to amaze you with “the way light sculpts history,” to turn the cathedral into a “vast, living canvas,” and to offer a show with the cumulative power “to reveal the hope and beauty contained in this sacred monument.”

Taken on the word of its hosts, it promises an opportunity for transcendence.

“For centuries, theologians and philosophers have said there are three transcendents, three paths to God: truth, goodness and beauty,” said New York Archbishop Ronald Hicks, introducing the show to its first audience. “And speaking of beauty, I believe that tonight we are going to experience something beautiful.”

Whether God is liable to reveal himself through hyper-hued bands of light or frothy animated clouds on the ceiling, I am not in a position to say, so I will reveal only that he did not do so for me.

Which is why, as I sat there, pleasantly impressed by the show’s technical prowess but wondering when we would reach the Omega Point I was sold, I came to thinking about the design of St. Patrick’s, its 21-year construction and the nameless worker who died on the job. 

The beauty of St. Patrick’s is its reality: those devastatingly large columns, that pearly vault, the laddered sunlight pouring through stained glass and those exhaustively chiseled arches producing not the illusion but the tactile reality that the whole church is straining, devoutly, upward.

The experience of rapture that St. Patrick’s offers hinges on a leap of faith. It is a leap of faith to believe it matters whether the ceiling is actually 112 feet high above the center isle, or if that great depth is a cinematic illusion; whether the light falling in is at the behest of the sun or piercing out of a halogen bulb; whether a master carver, balancing delicately on the wooden scaffolding, has crafted those foliate bosses studding the ceiling, or if they too are projections, giving texture to a smooth, acquiescent surface.

The experience that “LUMINISCENCE” offers is a safe flight over and across that faithful leap. Whereas the cathedral might invite you into experience, the light show insists experience upon you. The candied charm of its motion and gloss do not require submission or defiance. There is no impossible architectural reality to wrap the mind around, no great height to brave—certainly no wooden scaffolding to balance, slip, fall from. It stakes nothing. 

And, at the risk of implying that all great art requires a body count, I would argue that this is the principal shortcoming of “LUMINISCENCE.”