Elder Zosima says, “I ask myself: ‘What is hell?’ And I answer thus: ‘The suffering of being no longer able to love.’ ”*26 Jean-Paul Sartre famously said in his existentialist play No Exit, “Hell is other people.” Elder Zosima’s response to Sartre’s cynicism would be, “No, hell is the inability to love other people.” Dostoevsky’s Zosima seems very close to how we should understand hell. It has something to do with a wrong reaction to the very essence of God: love.
