Ars sine scientia nihil (“art without science is nothing”).1 These words of the Parisian Master Jean Mignot, enunciated in connection with the building of the Cathedral of Milan in 1398, were his answer to an opinion then beginning to take shape, that scientia est unum et ars aliud (“science is one thing and art another”). For Mignot, the rhetoric of building involved a truth to be expressed in the work itself, while others had begun to think, as we now think, of houses, and even of God’s house, only in terms of construction and effect. Mignot’s scientia cannot have meant simply “engineering,” for in that case his words would have been a truism, and no one could have questioned them; engineering, in those days, would have been called an art, and not a science, and would have been included in the recta ratio factibilium or “art” by which we know how things can and should be made. His scientia must therefore have had to do with the reason (ratio), theme, content, or burden (gravitas) of the work to be done, rather than with its mere functioning. Art alone was not enough, but sine scientia nihil.2
In connection with poetry we have the homologous statement of Dante with reference to his Commedia, that “the whole work was undertaken not for a speculative but a practical end ... The purpose of the whole is to remove those who are living in this life from the state of wretchedness and to lead them to the state of blessedness” (Ep. ad Can. Grand., 15 and 16). That is closely paralleled in Asvaghosa’s colophon to the Saundarânanda: “This poem, pregnant with the burden of Liberation, has been composed by me in the poetic manner, not for the sake of giving pleasure, but for the sake of giving peace.” Giselbertus, sculptor of the Last Judgment at Autun, does not ask us to consider his arrangement of masses, or to admire his skill in the use of tools, but directs us to his theme, of which he says in the inscription, Terreat hic terror quos terreus alligat error, “Let this terror affright those whom terrestrial error holds in bondage.”
And so, too, for music. Guido d’Arezzo distinguishes accordingly the true musician from the songster who is nothing but an artist:
Musicorum et cantorum magna est distancia:
Isti dicunt, illi sciunt quae componit musica.
Nam qui canit quod non sapit, diffinitur bestia;
Bestia non, qui non canit arte, sed usu;
Non verum facit ars cantorem, sed documentum.3
That is, “between the true ‘musicians’ and the mere ‘songsters,’ the difference is vast: the latter vocalize, the former understand the music’s composition. He who sings of what he savors not is termed a ‘brute’; not brute is he who sings, not merely artfully, but usefully; it is not art alone, but the doctrine that makes the true ‘singer.’”
The thought is like St. Augustine’s, “not to enjoy what we should use”; pleasure, indeed, perfects the operation, but is not its end. And like Plato’s, for whom the Muses are given to us “that we may use them intellectually (meta nou),4 not as a source of irrational pleasure (eph’ hêdonên alogon), but as an aid to the circling of the soul within us, of which the harmony was lost at birth, to help in restoring it to order and consent with itself” (Timaeus 47D, cf. 90D). The words sciunt quae componit musica are reminiscent of Quintilian’s “Docti rationem componendi intelligunt, etiam indocti voluptatem” (IX.4.116); and these are an abbreviation of Plato, Timaeus 80B, where it is said that from the composition of sharp and deep sounds there results “pleasure to the unintelligent, but to the intelligent that delight that is occasioned by the imitation of the divine harmony realized in mortal motions.” Plato’s “delight” (euphrosunê), with its festal connotation (cf. Homeric Hymns IV.482), corresponds to Guido’s verb sapit, as in sapientia, defined by St. Thomas Aquinas as scientia cum amore; this delight is, in fact, the “feast of reason.” To one who plays his instrument with art and wisdom it will teach him such things as grace the mind; but to one who questions his instrument ignorantly and violently, it will only babble (Homeric Hymns IV.483). Usu may be compared to usus as the jus et norma loquendi (Horace, Ars poetica, 71, 72), and corresponds, I think, to a Platonic ôphelimôs = frui, fruitio and Thomist uti = frui, fruitio (Sum. Theol. I.39.8c).
That “art” is not enough recalls the words of Plato in Phaedrus 245A, where not merely art, but also inspiration is necessary, if the poetry is to amount to anything. Mignot’s scientia and Guido’s documentum are Dante’s dottrina at which (and not at his art) he asks us to marvel (Inferno IX.61); and that dottrina is not his own but what “Amor (Sanctus Spiritus) dictates within me” (Purgatorio XXIV.52, 53). It is not the poet but “the God (Eros) himself that speaks” (Plato, Ion 534, 535); and not fantasy but truth, for “Omne verum, a quocumque dicatur, est a Spiritu Sancto” (St. Ambrose on I Cor. 12:3); “Cathedram habet in caelo qui intus corda docet” (St. Augustine, In epist. Joannis ad parthos); “O Lord of the Voice, implant in me thy doctrine (srutam), in me may it abide” (AV I.1.2).
That “to make the primordial truth intelligible, to make the unheard audible, to enunciate the primordial word, such is the task of art, or it is not art”5—not art, but quia sine scientia, nihil—has been the normal and ecumenical view of art. Mignot’s conception of architecture, Guido’s of music, and Dante’s of poetry underlie the art, and notably the “ornament,” of all other peoples and ages than our own—-whose art is “unintelligible.”6 Our private (idiôtikos) and sentimental (pathêtikos) contrary heresy (i.e., view that we prefer to entertain) which makes of works of art an essentially sensational experience,7 is stated in the very word “aesthetics,” aisthêsis being nothing but the biological “irritability” that human beings share with plants and animals. The American Indian cannot understand how we “can like his songs and not share their spiritual content.”8 We are, indeed, just what Plato called “lovers of fine colors and sounds and all that art makes of these things that have so little to do with the nature of the beautiful itself” (Republic 476B). The truth remains, that “art is an intellectual virtue,” “beauty has to do with cognition.”9 “Science renders the work beautiful; the will renders it useful; perseverance makes it lasting.”10 Ars sine scientia nihil.