Love Is God

Benjamin Viulet's idea of love has nothing to do with floating serenity. It is human, muddy, and brave, and he calls it the only thing that has ever been real.

At the center of Benjamin Viulet’s worldview sits a single, deliberately provocative claim: “love is god.” Not, he is quick to clarify, “the bearded one on a throne, not the one who watches, but the one who becomes.” For Viulet, love is “the only thing that has ever been real, the only ever eternal truth,” and crucially, it is not a serene spiritual state but a fully human, often messy act of courage. It is the belief that anchors his art, his atelier, and his life.

What does Benjamin Viulet mean by “love is god”?

Viulet uses “god” not in a denominational sense but as a name for the ground of reality. In his framework, the world was deliberately “made so covered in illusion, so soaked in suffering and separation, that love would not be something forced upon us, but something chosen, freely, bravely.” Suffering, in this view, is not evidence against love but the condition that makes choosing it meaningful. “That is the beauty. that is the test. that is the point.”

“i do not care what you believe. i care how you love.”

Viulet’s love is not serene, it is muddy

What distinguishes his philosophy from typical spiritual writing is his insistence that love is human, not transcendent. He explicitly rejects “being a floating vegetable priest who thinks being human is beneath them.” Real love, for Viulet, “is being human, with all its rawness, with all its laughter, with all its fucking mud.” It is “calling out someone’s bullshit and still staying for dinner,” “crying mid-sentence and finishing the poem anyway.” This grounded, unsentimental view is what keeps his spirituality from tipping into the precious.

Love as courage

For Viulet, love is not the absence of pain but “the courage to hold it.” The bravest act a soul can perform is to “choose love, again and again, without a guarantee, without proof, without reward, just because it is true.” This reframes love from a feeling that happens to you into a repeated decision you make, especially after being hurt, which connects directly to his teaching on choosing the heart over the mind’s fear.

Why this belief matters to his art

The claim that “love is god” is not separate from his work, it is its purpose. Viulet’s four sacraments culminate in the message that “you are love, forgotten maybe, but never gone.” His art exists to return people to that recognition. When audiences report being moved to tears and to reconsidering their lives, as covered in our piece on his viral reach, it is this belief, delivered through image rather than sermon, that is doing the work.