A call eas­ily mis­un­der­stood. What might fame be? Some nov­elty, per­haps, worth report­ing? Bad news or good news, word of an unpleas­ant or a pleas­ant event? Or per­haps the pur­suit of renown, of ambi­tion, the wish to become fam­ous? To bathe in the atten­tion of oth­ers – how many people long for that!? Becom­ing a celebrity, how­ever, is a heavy bur­den. In the chase for fame, man no longer even lives his own life, but is a slave to his life of appear­ances. He is left at the mercy of a dan­ger­ous drug, the atten­tion of oth­ers, and to win this atten­tion he will sac­ri­fice any­thing.

What is more, in a car­ni­val world everything is turned upside down: fair is foul and foul is fair… In most cases the doubt­ful and uncer­tain are held up as examples, and the good is lam­pooned. In the world turned upside down, the dis­hon­our­able sets the stand­ard, and the vir­tu­ous is the excep­tion.

But the say­ing holds true: every won­der lasts but three days. Celebrit­ies come and inev­it­ably van­ish, prac­tic­ally without a trace. Surely there exist count­less people of whom no one knows, whom no tin­sel fame lifts on its wings, and yet their con­tri­bu­tion to the order of the uni­verse is incom­par­ably great­er than that of the shoot­ing stars.

In the East the crav­ing for renown is regarded as a base­ness akin to mule's urine. Then surely it is not this kind of fame that is meant here, still less the tabloid news of our age, which shows the world grossly dis­tor­ted, through its dark side alone. If it is news we are to seek, then above all we should seek the glad tid­ings, the good news (evan­geli­on), which assures us that the Abso­lute Truth does indeed exist.

One can set out in search of some­thing from two dir­ec­tions: either out of lack, or out of abund­ance. As long as man exists at the mercy of worldly van­it­ies, he tries to fill the gaps in him­self, and that is why he seeks celebrity. The one who has abund­ance seeks for anoth­er reas­on: he wishes to share. If I seek fame for myself, even by amass­ing vir­tues, it may still be mere selfish­ness, mere ambi­tion. But if I seek fame, or any other noble ideal, for its own worth, then that is a spir­itu­al qual­ity.

Seek fame!, then, is not a mat­ter of pub­li­city, and know­ing the cul­tur­al con­text is essen­tial to read­ing it rightly. In Stoic philo­sophy, for example, the sole source of fame, of a man's good name, is vir­tue. The good name that springs from a vir­tu­ous life is the only ideal worth liv­ing for, not for the pleas­ant feel­ing that esteem brings, but simply for the sake of fol­low­ing vir­tue, for the beauty of liv­ing up to it. So in truth it is not about seek­ing fame, but about seek­ing the source, the ori­gin of fame. Where a healthy moral order of val­ues pre­vails, vir­tue makes a man fam­ous, and immor­al­ity infam­ous. The maxim, then, calls us to prac­tise a vir­tu­ous way of life and to devel­op a healthy moral sense. In ourselves and in the con­duct of oth­ers alike, this is what we must seek. In this way we meet what the prac­tice of the vir­tues requires, but ideal­ising cer­tain moral ten­ets is not enough, and it is wise also to seek the com­pany of those whose fame rests on moral grounds. In good com­pany it is easy to rise.

A bird is known by its feath­ers, a man by his friends. Among wolves you learn only to howl, but in the com­pany of eagles you can soar ever high­er. Who­ever does not help you climb wants you to creep and crawl. Do not fol­low a man who is going nowhere. Those who do not make you more will, in the end, only make you less. (Gandhi)

Fame, being fam­ous, is ulti­mately a divine attrib­ute, and more pre­cisely still, renown is a god­dess, kin to good for­tune and to its god­dess. But true renown is recor­ded in the etern­al world, on earth all things pass…