Next, what type of house does the soul live in? It is a two-story house. The psychologist too often assumes that it is a one-roomed cottage with a mud floor; and never even attempts to go upstairs. The extreme Transcendentalist sometimes talks as though it were perched in the air, like the lake dwellings of our primitive ancestors, and had no ground floor at all. A more humble attention to facts suggests that neither of these simplifications is true. We know that we have a ground floor, a natural life biologically conditioned, with animal instincts and affinities; and that this life is very important, for it is the product of the divine creativity – its builder and maker is God.
But we know too that we have an upper floor, a supernatural life, with supernatural possibilities, a capacity for God; and that this, man’s peculiar prerogative, is more important still. If we try to live on one floor alone we destroy the mysterious beauty of our human vocation; so utterly part of the fugitive and creaturely life of this planet and yet so deeply couloured by Eternity; so entirely one with the world of nature, and yet, “in the Spirit,” a habitation of God. “Thou madest him lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship.” We are created both in Time and Eternity, not truly one, but truly two; and every thought, word and act must be subdued to the dignity of that doubly situation in which Almighty God has placed and companions the childish spirit of man.
Therefore a full and wholesome spiritual life can never consist in living upstairs, and forgetting to consider the ground floor and its homely uses and needs; thus ignoring the humbling fact that those upper rooms are entirely supported by it. Nor does it consist in the constant, exasperated investigations of the shortcomings of the basement.
When Saint Teresa said that her prayers had become “solid like a house,” she meant that its foundations now went down into the lowly but firm ground of human nature, the concrete actualities of the natural life; and on those solid foundations, its walls rose up toward heaven. The strength of the house consisted in that intimate welding together of the divine and the human, which she found in its perfection in the humanity of Christ. There, in the common stuff of human life which He blessed by His presence, the saints have ever seen the homely foundations of holiness. Since we are two-story creatures, called to a natural and a supernatural status, both sense and spirit must be rightly maintained, kept in order, consecrated to the purposes of the city, of our full obligations are to be fulfilled.
The house is built for God; to reflect, on each level, something of His unlimited Perfection. Downstairs that general rightness of adjustment to all this-world obligations, which the ancients called the quality of Justice; and the homely virtues of Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude reminding us of our creatureliness, our limitations, and so humbling and disciplining us. Upstairs, the heavenly powers of Faith, Hope, and Charity; tending towards the Eternal, nourishing our life towards God, and having no meaning apart from God.
-The House of the Soul
The Carpenter's Nail 