It might continue to age just the same; so that at any rate in old age, when the body ceased to be healthy, the consciousness would begin to be affected, and slowly immortality would be snuffed out again. For a brief moment the light of immortality would shine, only to be snuffed out again a moment later. I cannot believe it. Either it would not shine, or it would not be snuffed out. Besides to regard the mind as being in eternity even for a limited period, and the body rigidly fixed in a flux of time, is to re-introduce something very like Descartes' dualism. Thrown out of the front door, this theory tries to creep in by the back. It is unsatisfactory.
This discussion is not as academic as the reader might suppose, because the Church (in an effort to be modern) is teaching that we are already immortal, already in eternity. Christ's second coming into the world is an ever present reality. This ever present regenesis takes place in our witness: the witness of ordinary men-in-the-pew. If Christ is reincarnated at all, it is in our flesh. Heaven is both here and hereafter. It's true the Church doesn't speak of the immortality of the flesh, but it does speak of the resurrection of the body, though it is never very clear what sort of body is meant. Well, is this sense or rubbish? If it is rubbish, it wouldn't be the first time that the Church has talked rubbish.
The obvious speculative guess is that if immortality dawned in the mind and consciousness, it would lead in the end to immortality of the flesh too; at the same moment that the mind escaped from the flux of evolutionary time, from the pangs of becoming, the flesh would begin its escape as well. How would it do this? The flesh would become self-reflective like the mind. Can the flesh be self-reflective? It can certainly have a quality in the imagination, and in a flux of time I suspect this progresses irreversibly. It is difficult for anyone to live down their past entirely. The best one can do is to forget. In…