Hell, madam, is to love no longer.

“Hell, madam, is to love no longer.” Thus spoke Georges Bernanos, the French novelist and mystic whose pen cut through the illusions of modern life to reveal the soul’s secret landscape. In these six words, he defines not the hell of flames and torment imagined by the fearful, but the deeper, truer hell—the hell of emptiness, the spiritual desolation that begins when the heart ceases to love. For Bernanos, love is the breath of the soul, the fire of divine life within man; and to lose it, to grow cold, indifferent, or bitter, is to perish while still alive.

This saying emerges from Bernanos’ Christian vision of humanity—a vision steeped in grace, suffering, and redemption. He believed that to love is to partake in the very nature of God, who is love itself. Thus, when a person loses the capacity to love—when pride, despair, or cynicism freezes the heart—they fall not merely into sadness, but into spiritual death. “Hell,” he implies, is not a place to which one is sent; it is a condition of being, a self-chosen exile from love. The fire of hell is not the wrath of God, but the absence of His warmth in the soul that has forgotten how to care.

The ancients knew this truth, though they spoke it in other tongues. The Greeks told of Narcissus, who fell in love not with others but with his own reflection, and thus wasted away, consumed by self-love that bore no fruit. His beauty became his prison, his desire his doom. The Buddhists, too, speak of the hells of attachment, where the spirit burns in loneliness and craving, separated from compassion. And in the words of Dante, the deepest circle of hell is not fire, but ice—where love has turned cold, and the soul is frozen in perfect isolation. Bernanos stands in this lineage, crying out that love alone keeps the human heart alive and the spirit bound to eternity.

Consider the story of Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist who endured the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Surrounded by horror, stripped of everything he owned, he discovered one truth that could not be taken: the power to love. He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing—the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” In the camps, he survived by holding in his mind the image of his wife, by loving her even when he did not know if she lived. In that love, he found meaning; in meaning, he found strength. Others perished not from hunger, but from hopelessness, from the death of love. Frankl lived because he still loved—and thus, even in a man-made hell, he was free.

To love, Bernanos teaches, is not merely to feel affection or desire; it is to will the good of another, to open oneself to the divine current that flows through all life. To cease to love is to break that connection—to become an island adrift, cut off from the source of being. The proud man, who believes he needs no one; the bitter man, who forgives no one; the apathetic man, who helps no one—these, Bernanos says, already taste the ashes of hell. For the soul that cannot love is not punished from without; it devours itself from within, consumed by the hunger for the very thing it has denied.

The meaning of Bernanos’ words, then, is both terrible and redemptive. Terrible, because they show that the loss of love is the truest suffering; redemptive, because love can always be rekindled, no matter how dark the night. Even a faint ember, once fanned by mercy, can blaze again into warmth. Hell is not eternal unless the soul chooses it; the gates of despair swing open at the touch of compassion. As long as one heart still beats with the will to love, hope remains.

The lesson for us, my listeners, is this: guard your capacity to love above all else. The world will tempt you with cynicism, betrayal, and disappointment. It will tell you that to love is to risk pain—and it is. But to refuse to love is to lose your humanity altogether. When you are wounded, forgive; when you are tired, be kind; when you are afraid, reach outward instead of inward. For every act of love, however small, defies the gravity of despair.

So remember Bernanos’ warning and promise: Hell is to love no longer—but heaven begins the moment the heart remembers how. Keep the flame alive, even when the winds of the world blow cold. Love not because others are worthy, but because love itself is the pulse of eternity within you. And when your final hour comes, you will not descend into darkness, for your heart will still be radiant—burning with the light that even death cannot extinguish.