R. R. Reno is professor of theology at Creighton University and (as of April 1) editor of First Things. He is the author of the forthcoming book Fighting the Noonday Devil — and Other Essays Personal and Theological.

Here, as he does in his book, he shows that it is the real-life manifestations of love and loyalty — far beyond intellectual abstractions or theories — that train us for true piety.

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We are not meant to leave things as they are; God commanded Adam and Eve to till and keep the garden and exercise dominion. Society and the soul need to be subjected to a constant, cultivating scrutiny: Are we living as we should?

In order to think about how to live, we absorb detailed information about the world. More powerful still is our capacity to theorize. We can formulate a concept, for example, of human motivation and behavior, and develop psychological or sociological theories. In this way, we hope to see the anatomy of social reality — the muscles and bones and metabolic systems of culture.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about the move toward theory and abstraction. On the contrary, it can be very helpful. But it’s tempting to imagine that theory is the most important way to figure out how to live as we should.

Consider, for example, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism. He had a formula with which to answer every moral, legal, and social question: the greatest good for the greatest number. The appeal is obvious. A Benthamite can go from London to Lhasa and apply his theory, needing nothing but metrics of pain and pleasure to feed into the adding machine of utilitarian calculation. The unique people, the distinctive smells and sights and sounds — what romances us and arrests our imaginations — need not concern a man with a moral theory as abstract as Bentham’s.

Marxism also promises answers to all questions, and it does so with far more theoretical complexity. This has its own appeal, lending itself to scholastic arguments about how many proletarian revolutionaries can dance on the head of a bourgeois counter-revolutionary, the sorts of debates that please clever men eager to show their command of world-historical truths.

José Ortega y Gasset once wrote against the theoretical impulse, “To create a concept is to leave the world behind.” An overstatement, no doubt. Our ability to enter into abstractions and use concepts allows us to see life not just as a series of instances, but also as a web of relations. Reality has an architecture, and we benefit from discerning its structural principles.

But there is a temptation as well. I wrote many of the essays in Fighting the Noonday Devil in order to resist the spell that concepts and theories cast over my own mind. Clinging to the side of an ice-covered mountain, sipping a beer in a Wyoming bar, watching my daughter chant the Hebrew Bible — these moments have arrested me and taken control of my memory. I’ve tried to serve them as a writer rather than take command as an analyst. I’ve come to see that this disposition of service makes our minds pious rather than commanding, makes us docile to life’s truths rather than aggressive in our efforts to wrest from reality what we can comprehend.

The concrete particularity of life shimmers with the power of reality, a power that always overflows and floods our concepts with more than we can theorize, analyze, and fix with general concepts and abstractions. We can dissect. We can organize. We can categorize. Yet I am more and more convinced that theories do not take us into the depths of life. As John Henry Newman’s motto as a cardinal put it: heart speaks to heart.

We can only reach the fullness of reality by abandoning ourselves to life’s particularity, allowing the truth of things — especially the truth of other human beings and our common life together — to dissect our souls. The proper word for this abandonment is love. Love works very differently from theory, conquering the lover rather than the beloved. Love subjects us, and thankfully so, for truth shines from the outside.

Fighting the Noonday Devil was written for the sake of love, not theory. Yes, I have theoretical things to say and conceptual points to make, especially in the first and last essays. But this is not a book about my ideas (even and perhaps especially not my theological ideas). It’s an effort to do justice to the claims that living realities have made on me.