The people in Hell have made themselves their own god.  They refused to submit to the authority of God, and recognised nothing as higher or more worthwhile than their own desires.  They cared only for themselves, and so in the end they have only themselves to care for.

So Hell, the final state of selfishness, is a place of utter loneliness.  Each soul hates its fellows as they hate it.  All is confusion and discord.  They have lost God for ever, for their Judge has spoken and passed his sentence, “…go away from me, you evildoers” (NRSV, Matthew 7:23), although they had already gone away from him long before.  So now they have neither hope nor love.  All is hatred and despair and blasphemy.  For the souls of the eternally lost are literally beyond redemption, having rejected the salvation Christ offered them.

As they look back on their lives they are filled not with penitence but with the torment of remorse.  That is to say, they do not grieve over their past sins because by them they have wounded the love of God; rather they wish bitterly but in vain that they could undo the past because they dimly perceive that it is their selfishness and their sins that have brought the misery of Hell upon them.

In addition to remorse there is a never ending sense of frustration.  Sin provides pleasures and sometimes happiness, though only temporarily.  Hell provides neither.  “The souls of the lost picture to themselves all the pleasures of their past life in contrast to their present lack of every kind of comfort.  As St Bernard says, ‘What is more intolerable than ever to long for that which will never be; and ever to rebel against that which will always be’ ” (2)

These torments – the misery of separation from God, the ceaseless gnawing of remorse, the frustration and the despair – together constitute the symbolic fires of Hell.