Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84Plough Quarterly • Summer   M y dear Wormwood, . . . The sense of ownership in general is always to be encour- aged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in heaven and in hell, and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from people’s belief that they “own” their bodies–those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another! It is as if a royal child whom his father has placed, for love’s sake, in titular command of some great province, under the real rule of wise counsel- ors, should come to fancy he really owns the cities, the forests, and the corn, in the same way as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor. We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun–the finely graded differ- ences that run from “my boots” through “my dog,” “my servant,” “my wife,” “my father,” “my master,” and “my country,” to “my God.” They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of “my boots,” the “my” of ownership. Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by “my teddy bear,” not the old imagined recipient of affections to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful), but “the bear I can pull to pieces if I like.” And at the other end of the scale, we have taught people to say “my God” in a sense not really very different from “my boots,” meaning “the God on whom I have a claim for my distin- guished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit–the God I have done a corner in.” And all the time the joke is that the word “mine” in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father [the devil] or the Enemy will say “mine” of each thing that exists, and especially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong–certainly not to them, whatever happens. At present the Enemy says “mine” of everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that he made it. Our Father hopes in the end to say “mine” of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest. Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) was a British novelist and Christian apologist. Possessions C . S . L E W I S Of all the things that can come between people and poison life in community, possessiveness is perhaps the most common. In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape, a senior demon, advises his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, on how best to corrupt a human. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)