“Within the next few decades medical science will come up with techniques that…will result in physical rejuvenation…a continuous cycle of aging and rejuvenation until the secret of immortality is found” (Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer, by David Boyd Haycock, Yale Press)
Something within our human psyche creates a yearning to live forever. We have been like this for centuries, according to the author of the above book. Early scientists thought that alchemy would do it. Later on it was thought that monkey glands were the key to longevity. The Russian intellectual, Nicolai Federov, predicted a time when humans would learn a way to reconstruct humans and bring them back to life by using a few cells from the deceased. Before that we would postpone death and then revive the recently dead, until the key to immortality was discovered. The book just published, Mortal Coil, reviews the latest advances in the ongoing endeavor to find a way to first prolong life and eventually make human beings live eternally. The present approach is not to await an immanent end of the world, but to extend our lives—ultimately to make humans live forever.
The contemporary solution is cryonics, freezing of the person near death just before it happens, or before brain damage occurs. “Resurrection” will come, it is hoped, sometime in the unforeseeable future, when modern or rather future science figures a way to solve that nasty last enemy, death. Somewhere—Yellow Pages?—one can find the services that will provide the means for that illusive search for a renewal of life beyond death. This is how it works: Not the entire body, only the head, is kept frozen yet alive. Euphemistically it’s termed “popsicle.” The head is to be eventually thawed out. The expectation is that medical science by then will have perfected a human robot on which the head is attached. Science fiction buffs know that in Robo Man and Cryonic Man this has been achieved—at least in fiction. What would happen if the thawed noggin is still not quite in the age of immortality? Just refreeze him…or her…or it…and hold out for another unknown era? Eventually science will arrive at the time when degeneration and decomposition is a thing of the past, and human cells do not atrophy with time.
Among my reactions the first is: Where is the soul? Is there a soul at all? Typical of post-Christian and even actual Christian influence, Orthodox Christianity separates from such a prescription that would locate the most human part of the person in the head. We are people of the heart. We get the idea from our Lord Himself: “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34). It’s not just Orthodox Christianity—it’s basic Christianity. The greatest rulers of old Europe, the Hapsburg Dynasty, would remove the heart from the dead member of their family and place it in a lead container; the body would be buried, but the heart would be stored in a special location. It is much easier to change your mind than the feelings of the heart. To transform your heart from one way of thinking to another is done by repentance. Our souls spend a lifetime sorting out right from wrong, good from bad, and virtue from vice. One lifetime is barely adequate to get it all right. If it were not so, the Creator would have given us more time to look at ourselves and to change what we are, repent from our sins, and open ourselves not to a reincarnation of life on earth, but to a place waiting for us in the Kingdom of Heaven.