58. Why being famous can’t make you happy
58. WHY BEING FAMOUS CAN’T MAKE YOU HAPPY
Fame or glory seems to be just honor multiplied, and St. Thomas already refuted honor as a candidate for happiness: it’s external, not internal. So fame or glory is obviously the wrong answer for the same reason. Is there anything else, any other profound and practical lesson, that we can learn from his rejection of fame or glory as our last end and the thing happiness consists in?
(Fame or) glory consists in being well known and praised. . . . Now the thing known is related to human knowledge otherwise than to God’s knowledge; for human knowledge is caused by the things known, whereas God’s knowledge is the cause of the things known. Wherefore the perfection of human good which is called happiness cannot be caused by human knowledge, but rather human knowledge of another’s happiness proceeds from and in a fashion is caused by human happiness itself. . . . Consequently man’s happiness cannot consist in fame or glory. On the other hand, man’s good depends on God’s knowledge as its cause. And therefore man’s beatitude depends, as on its cause, on the glory which man has with God (I-II,2,3) (Cf Ps 1:6; Mt 7:23; Jn 10:14).
C. S. Lewis writes somewhere that he read in a religious periodical the statement that the most important thing is what we think of God. By God Himself, says Lewis, it is not. What God thinks of us is not only more important but infinitely more important.
Why? Because what we think does not determine reality; reality determines what we think, if we think truly. For that is what truth is: conformity of thought to reality. But what God thinks does determine reality, for God is the Designer and Creator of all reality except Himself. God’s knowledge does not conform to any pre-existing reality, as ours does. There is no pre-existing reality. He does not bow down to anything outside Himself, to any creature. That would be idolatry. Imagine God Himself committing idolatry! He is not a cosmic hypocrite who does not practice what He preaches to us.
In other words, God is an artist, not a scientist. A scientist is wrong if he says that mayflies live longer than elephants. But an artist could create a story in which mayflies live longer than elephants. Scientists discover the world of science, the world they did not create; but artists design the worlds of art, for they create those worlds. Shakespeare defines Hamlet, not Hamlet Shakespeare.
The practical payoff of this theological point is that while it is very important to be intellectually right in conforming your thoughts to reality, and most especially your thoughts about God, it is even more important to be morally and religiously right, i.e., to conform your reality to what God thinks and reveals, especially what He reveals about His will for you.
For to obey His will is to become more real. To disobey is to lose your reality, your humanity, your you-ness. You can lose your very self, your very identity, in Hell. That is why the demon-possessed man in the Gospels cannot say “I” any more but only “we.” He has disappeared into the demons that are possessing him, so when Christ asks him his name, he replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many” (Mk 5:9). That is what is at stake in every moral decision we make: we become more real or less real, more Heavenly or more Hellish, more true or more false, more “I” or “Legion,” by conforming our wills and lives to God’s will for us or to the Devil’s will. For that divine will and Mind is our very identity. Hamlet has no identity outside Shakespeare or in opposition to Shakespeare. Nor have we outside of or in opposition to God.
Those fools (yes, there are fools!) who say that truth is created by our minds, that truth is “my truth” or “your truth”, and that you can “create your own reality”, are not just confused: they are maximally confused, they are falling into the greatest possible confusion: they are confusing themselves with God. Human minds can’t make other human beings happy because human minds cannot make anything objectively real. Only God can. What others think of you can do nothing to you, only to them.