Maybe I’m making something out of nothing, but I am fascinating by the heavy lifting done today at least in English and German by the word “thing.” It’s not just that we overuse the word. What is really interesting is that we rely on it to produce a certain je ne sais quoi. When someone offends or causes a major stir we say they are “making a big thing of it.” One might just as well reply, “Well, that’s the thing,” as one details what is most vital about the argument. We struggle even to avoid the word when speaking about something such as God, who is constitutively not a thing.
This one powerful word conveys a sense of real (i.e. “thingly”) meaning. Check out this verse from “Wishes” by Superchick, where she laments a broken relationship:
The saddest thing is you could be anything
That you could want
We could have been everything
But now we’re not
Now it’s not anything at all
The saddest part, in other words, is that a relationship can go from meaningful to meaningless. When love is drained out, the situation reaches the point where “it does not signify,” to use Jane Austen’s expression.
What this points to is that despite our dictionary definition that makes the thing into any mere object of experience, in a deeper sense the thing is that which is objectively real and thus able to carry underlying meaning. After all, the very word “real” comes from res, the Latin word for thing. At its heart the thing is das Ding an sich, Kant’s noumenon, for which Heidegger sought within the existential frame of Dasein.
To some extent, it’s the very familiarity of this word that has carried us away from its inner meaning. After all, the word “thing” is surprisingly rare in premodern discourse. In Augustine’s language, for example, objects are not typically categorized as “things” but rather as “substances.” While even then a substance could be called a thing, in most cases what we really intend to denote when categorizing an object is not the thingliness of that object (i.e. its inner reality) but rather its objective presence-at-hand (Heidegger’s Vorhandenheit). In contrast, it makes sense that the word res would take center stage within sacramental theology. The sacrament makes present grace, for example, which in terms of meaning is rightly called a thing but ought not to be called a substance.
In a sense, the sacramental economy is Christianity’s way of making a big thing of the world. The next time someone asks why we revere relics, just reply “it’s a thing” and give yourself a smug smile for having said everything while probably communicating nothing at all. Christianity is the religion of the thing. I’ll leave you with the immortal words of Joe Biden: