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'''Philosophical Outlook'''
Frank saw Orthodox Christianity as fulfillment of his Jewish background steeped in the Old Testament. As a philosopher he was influenced by several strands of Orthodox-related thought, including the intuitivism of Nicholas Lossky, Vladimir Solovyov's ''sobornost'' philosophy, and the hesychastic teaching of the Russian ''Philokalia'' or ''Dobrotolubiye''. He especially singled out the Western late-medieval mystical writer Nicholas of Cusa as an influence, together with the Neo-Platonist Plotinus, and identified himself as a Christian Platonist. Nicholas of Cusa in fifteenth century Catholic Germany had been influenced both by pre-Schism Christian writers such as John Scottus Eriugena (himself influenced heavily by St. Maximus the Confessor) and by his own personal encounters with Byzantine culture, and was outside the orbit of mainstream Scholasticism. Frank like other modern Russian philosophers also was influenced by nineteenth-century German romantic philosophy. His work includes references to the writings of poets such as Goethe and Rilke, as well as to other thinkers such as Bergson and Spinoza, although it remains distinctively rooted in substance spirit in first-millennial patristic Neo-Chalcedonian and apophatic theology, and related hesychastic thought. In his particular scholarly genealogy, Frank as a Russian Orthodox writer connected with a stream of Christian philosophy different from the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas and later Roman Catholic scholars, one related to what Byzantine hymnody termed "the hidden God," an apophatic phrase also used by Nicholas of Cusa. Nevertheless, he seemed sensitive to criticisms of his work as pantheistic, arguing that it was panentheistically based in the Christian God. His philosophical reflections toward the end of his life became increasingly explicitly Christian. In exile he wore around his neck both an Orthodox cross and a tiny bag with soil from his mother's grave in Russia as a reminder of his homeland.
In Frank's development of social philosophy, he articulated a view of society as an interaction of ''sobornost'' (hidden organic spiritual connectedness encouraging a sense of holistic unity in the God-man Jesus Christ) and mechanical organizational aspects of human life tending toward individualism, which leads him to an Orthodox definition of justice and natural law different from that which developed in the Catholic and Protestant West. Likewise, in his articulation of ontology and epistemology, he highlighted interaction between an objective hidden-but-experiential unity of reality in Christ, and cognitive understanding that was individualized. Frank argued that it was the unfathomable or unknowable aspect of being that ultimately was the source of concrete personhood and intuitive objective reasoning. In all this, his overall cosmology and anthropology reflect closely aspects of St. Maximus the Confessor's teachings, as well as those of St. John of Damascus in finding personhood in Christ rather than what Charles Taylor calls the "buffered self" of modernity emerging from late Scholasticism. Frank's philosophy finds its context also in coping with the evils of totalitarianism in the 20th century, as experienced particularly by Russian Orthodox Christian culture but also in relation to the Holocaust and his Jewish background.
Frank’s writings as they relate to cosmology and anthropology arguably are not problematic from the standpoint of Orthodoxy when read in light of recent scholarship on St. Maximus the Confessor's work, which they closely parallel, and to the application of hesychasm to psychology articulated by Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos and others. Frank’s philosophy parallels Vlachos’ writings in not emphasizing individual personalism in the same way as Berdyaev (along with commonalities), stressing personhood in the unfathomable “hidden God” of the Cross and Resurrection. Unlike the philosophical writings of two prominent contemporary Russian Orthodox priests, Fathers Sergius Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky, Frank's work never was condemned as heretical; he did not develop Sophianism or Sophiology as they did. He shared some of the same influences but with his own specific intellectual genealogy as noted above.
In terms of theodicy, Frank in his works ''The Fall of the Idols'' and ''The Meaning of Life'' shows keen awareness of the suffering and disruption of Russian Orthodox life amid the unleashing of great evil, which he identifies with demonic idolatry, in its objectifying self and others unto death. His biographer has said his approach to evil as of inconsequence in the face of love may also reflect Frank's need for tranquility amid the turmoils of both 20th-century refugee life. He criticized Western Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin as a source of disconnect from experiential Christian faith that he saw as the root of 20th-century totalitarian ideologiesand a certain type of heartless Western rationalism, and upheld Orthodox Trinitarian teachingas distinct from Catholic theology. Frank disagreed with Berdyaev's brief post-World War II reconciliation with the Soviet state as naive, seeing the Soviet system as totalitarian evil, although he had earlier in exile defended the post-Tikhonite Moscow Patriarchate's situation under the Soviets. While he wrote hopefully amid Communist and Nazi threats to Christianity of a potential Christian universalism, highly praised the writings of the ancient Sufi Muslim mystical writer Hussayn ibn-Mansur al-Hallaj, and had connections in the diaspora with the YMCA press and the World Council of Churches as sources of refugee aid, he was not active in organized ecumenism, and resisted American Protestant influence on the YMCA Russian youth movement among emigres.
All his works remain relatively little studied in 21st-century global Orthodox and secular scholarship, which is perhaps related in part to Frank's lack of firm academic institutional affiliation and ecclesiastical affiliations abroad(such as contemporaries like Fr. Georges Florovsky) as he often had to rely on the charity of friends and refugee aid grants, his unique refugee status precarious situation in Europe as an exiled ethnically Jewish Russian Orthodox philosopherwho was legally stateless and a target for the Nazi Final Solution, and because the nature of his work did not having encourage the controversial notoriety celebrity of some contemporary other Russian emigre intellectuals, such as Fr. Bulgakov and Berdyaev, given also Frank's more introverted family-centered life. Besides Jakim's introductions to his English translationsof some of Frank's books, another secondary source on the philosopher is Philip Boobbyer's biography, ''S.L. Frank: The Life And Work Of A Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950'' (1995)is a valuable source in English on Frank's life and work.