Every thousand years or so, there comes a thinker whose life
is as striking as his or her intellectual output is stunning. Viewed from this
perspective, it is remarkable indeed that within a period of 300+ years, the
world was to witness the convergent odysseys of four titans of thought who set
the agenda for the study of reality at every level. This is the period I like
to call the Golden Age of human thought. Between them, Avicenna of Persia (980-1037),
Moses Maimonides of Egypt (1135-1204), Thomas Aquinas of Italy (c.1225-1274)
and Madhvacharya of India (c.1238-1317) created a magnificent monument of thought
that underpins the very possibility of the scientific enterprise. It was the
mother of all Theories of Everything, one that was validated both by its inherent
logic and the success of modern science.
The point of departure for these thinkers, let’s call
them the Four, was simply that things exist. From this bare fact their minds
soared to the greatest insight possible to the human mind – the realization
that things exist only because there exists One who cannot not-exist, who exists
without beginning or end or any conceivable limitation. The very essence of
this Being is to BE – there is no question of was or will be for It always
IS. Thus we speak of “It” as “He who IS”, the “I
AM.” Each one of the Four considered this “equation of God”
to be THE fundamental truth:
Avicenna: In God alone, essence, what he
is, and existence, that he is, coincide. God’s essence is to exist.
“The essence of the Necessary Existent [God] can be no other than existence.”
Maimonides: “His existence is identical with his essence
and his true reality, and his essence is his existence.”
Aquinas: “There is a being, God, whose essence is His
very act of existing.”
Madhvacharya (Commentary on verse 17 of the Isavaya Upanishad
Basya): “’SO AHAM ASMI.’ This is the great ineffable name
of God, ‘I am that I AM’ ‘That Supreme Being (asau) which
indwells in Asu is the I AM.’”
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