The Spirit of Honors: Unconquerable Minds -Will Brady

Two years, four semesters, countless hours developing my mind with my Honors family, and a heck of a lot of blogging have lead to this. The Avengers saga and Game of Thrones (if you watch that on my Christian campus, heathens) aren't the only aspects of nerd culture concluding in the next couple weeks--my time in this glorious Honors cycle has come to a close as well. If I may say it, the reading for this final blog was entirely fitting. John Donne's poetry is excellent, and I'm tempted to write my research paper on "Death Be Not Proud" and Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. But a short, half-fleshed-out idea from his Devotions caught my attention even more.

Meditation IV is primarily about the power of the physician over disease, but before talking about him Donne mentions the human mind and body. He praises the human body as being the most complicated and potentially colossal thing in existence, and talks about how the human mind is blessed with infinite creative capabilities which could lead him to "comprehend all." Now, that sounds close to blasphemy, as this Christian writes about comprehending all when only God can comprehend all and when God Himself cannot be accurately comprehended by the human mind. Yet he could very easily be saying that the human mind comprehends all that exists in the material world and can also, in a sense, comprehend God's incomprehensibility. The mind can't understand how the Trinity works, but it can understand that the Trinity exists without outright exploding. The human mind and thought are quite possibly one of the single most incredible products of Creation--a physical lump of cells and matter which concocts entirely immaterial products.

What is the essence of a thought or idea? What are they made of? Where do they come from within the neurons of the brain, and where do they go when forgotten? What is "thinking" and how do we activate it? To do anything with the non-autonomous parts of our body, including think, we must first actively... think. It sounds like a catch-twenty-two, but this is how it works; perhaps someone far smarter than me can offer a good explanation as to how, but I do have a difficult time wrapping my head around my ability to wrap my head around things. Donne provokes a lot of thought about thought, and begins a commentary on how his ill body is imprisoned in bed, but his mind is capable of producing illnesses far worse than what he's suffering. That's all well and true, but he doesn't seem to hit on a certain point as much as I'd like.

Yes, his body is ill and imprisoned in a bed, but his mind--while capable of producing nasty things--is free. Barring horrible mental illnesses like Alzheimer's, the mind cannot be chained in the same manner as the body. The mind is infinitely more powerful and infinitely more free than flesh and bone; maybe Big Brother can try to break people mentally, but it is never nearly so easy as breaking a man physically. The mind is greater than the body; it makes us more like God than animals; it is by nature more like the immaterial spirit than the carnal flesh; it comes before any physical action, and that physical action occurs only by it. Thinking opens the gates of infinity--THAT is why our Honors Program exists.

Honors isn't here as an easier alternative to core English without as many papers. It isn't here for the Lounge or the parties. Honors is here as a community of people who are willing to tap into the unbounded possibilities of the human mind. It takes effort, yes, because countless thousands of brilliant minds throughout history have all struck out in wildly different directions in their exploration of infinity. But the payoff for the journey never ends so long as you are still following the trails. There will always be something intellectually valuable along the way, as well as fellow men and women to walk alongside. Perhaps the world will attack and kill you for your thinking--just ask Socrates and anyone ever martyred for finding reason in a certain religious faith. But the body is just organized dirt. It will die regardless of whether you are killed. The mind, and all it collects, are eternal. They have no end, extended on into Heaven or Hell. I pray we use ours wisely, not just for ourselves, but for all those around us. Learning how to think and how to use those thoughts--that is the spirit of our program.

Thanks, everyone, for being my Honors family.

We all know my last two comments were on my noble council’s posts, Zelda’s and Sophia’s stand-in Eliza’s.