Romano Guardini, in his book The Lord, describes how it was supposed to be:
God has shaped human life mysteriously indeed. Man’s essence is meant to leap up to its God and return with the life it has [received] from him. Man should live in a downward-sweeping movement that begins in heaven, not from earth upward, as animals do. His body should draw its sustenance from his spirit, his spirit from God; thus man’s whole being would be infused with ever-circulating vitality. But sin has broken this entity; sin that was the will to autonomous existence, that desired “to be Gods” (Gen. 3:5). And the arc of fire burned out; the ardent circle collapsed. True, man’s rational soul, being indestructible, remains, but its indestructibility has become a shadowy Erstaz. The body also remains, since it is the soul’s necessary covering, but it now covers a ‘dead’ soul, one no longer capable of transmitting to the body that life which God intended it to have. Thus life has become simultaneously real and unreal, ordered and chaotic, permanent and fleeting.