In Fairness to Pharisees.

The entire history of Christianity is the history of the extinguishing and new igniting of the fire. History develops that way in each separate soul, and it has developed that way in the world. We know the coldness and deadness of whole epochs of Christianity, we know the flaring up and spreading of the flames of authentic Christian evangelization, we know how scribes and pharisees alternate with the initiators of new paths, and their time with broad waves of suffering, asceticism, witness, repentance, and purification.

And once again we must say in all fairness that the role of the pharisees in Christianity is not exhausted only with the extinguishing of the fire, the freezing and killing of all that is alive and ardent. They do actually and authentically watch over, keep, preserve, and bear the coffer of Christian treasures. . . .

But along with that they try to protect the Church against authentic Christian fervor, against all fire in general; they only preserve what is sacred to them and keep others from being nourished by it. The evaluation of pharisaism’s significance and usefulness for the Church depends largely on the epoch in which the pharisees live. . . .

Apart from the immediate sense of the epoch, we can and must determine, in our judgments, its distinctness from the preceding epoch. This gives us the possibility of seeing what new things the Church now demands of us and what we must now free ourselves from so as not to harm her with what is old and even antiquated.

Mother Maria Skobtsova, A Justification of Pharisaism. Taken from Give Us this Day.

Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891–1945) was an Orthodox nun and martyr who perished in the gas chamber of Ravensbruck just days before the liberation of the camp.