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The Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher Semyon Ludvigovich Frank, Семен also known as S.L. Frank and Semen Frank, Семён Людвигович Франк, was born on Jan. 28, 1877(Gregorian calendar), in Moscow, and died on Dec. 19, 1950, in London. More than any other Russian philosopher of the so-called Silver Age who survived in exile, his life illustrated the effect of state terror in the 20th century. The Russian emigre scholar Fr. Vasily Vasilevich Zenkovsky in his standard ''A History of Russian Philosophy'' called Frank the greatest of Russian philosophers, while American translator-scholar Boris Jakim more recently called Frank's book ''The Unknowable'' (also translated “The Unfathomable”) the greatest work of Russian philosophy. Yet he is perhaps one of the least known of the Silver Age Russian philosophers today. A former observant Jew and Raised in a Jewish family with active interest in Jewish religious intellectual tradition, then a Marxist revolutionary, Frank married an Orthodox Christian in 1908 and converted to Orthodox Christianity in 1912. His politics evolved from revolutionary to liberal before 1917, and then to what he described as indicated was a creative conservatism and , which a biographer labeled as termed liberal conservatism (his . His philosophical outlook has also been described as that of articulating a metaphysical libertarianism , but more centrally as well as expressing anti-utopianist Christian realism and Christian existentialism). Singled out by Lenin for exile in 1922 on the "ships of philosophers", Frank fled Communism and ended up with his family first in Berlin and then near the outbreak of World War II in southern France. Because of his Jewish ethnic background he was in danger from Nazi Anti-Semitism, where, howeverand after interviews with the Gestapo, they then had to go went into hiding and suffer separation after in southern France towards the Nazi invasionend of World War II as his family was temporarily separated, due an experience his wife described as similar to being "hunted like an animal." He and his Jewish ethnic backgroundwife Tatyana Sergeevna Bartseva (1886-1984), whose union in marriage he came to cherish as a concrete expression of the mystery of Christian love, had four children: Victor (1909-?), Alexei (1910-1969), Natalia (1912-1999), and Vasiliy (1920-1996).
'''Assessments of his work''' Highly praised for the clarity of his writing style by Fr. Zenkovsky and Nicholas Lossky in both their classic histories of Russian philosophy (and again rated overall by Zenkovsky as the greatest Russian philosopher), Frank nonetheless was criticized by them, especially by Lossky (also a prominent contemporary Russian philosopher) for articulating a sense of "total unity" allegedly at odds with Christian distinctions between God and Creation. Another prominent contemporary Russian philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, likewise [http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1939_446.html praised Frank’s overall contribution to Christian philosophy, while criticizing what Berdyaev called a monism inadequately taking into account the nature of evil], although Berdyaev's own anti-ascetic charismatic emphasis is alleged to fall outside of Orthodox tradition by Fr. Seraphim Rose among others. 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, 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 of self and others unto death. His biographer has said his approach to evil as inconsequential in the face of love may also reflect Frank's need for tranquility amid the turmoils of 20th-century refugee life. He criticized the Western Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin as a source of the disconnect from experiential Christian faith that he saw as the root of 20th-century totalitarian ideologies and a certain type of heartless Western rationalism, while upholding Orthodox Trinitarian teaching as 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. In 1965, some 15 years after Frank's death, Fr. Georges Florovsky, former dean of St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary and professor emeritus at Harvard and professor at Princeton, wrote the Foreword to the English translation of Frank's ''Reality and Man'' in which he expressed sympathy for Frank's philosophical search but categorized it as overly pessimistic, apophatic, and Platonist, in allegedly eschewing the Cross for a Platonic escapism. Fr. Florovsky was responding to a critique of his own academic field of theology as overly abstract by Frank, from the latter's emphasis on Christian existentialism and experiential faith. Frank's philosophical approach to the Cross in that way could be thought of as that of the Wise Thief, St. Rakh in Russian tradition, who "stole Paradise" while on Golgotha. Frank suggested in ''Reality and Man'' a parallel between his own writings' focus on the coincidence-yet-distinction of the Kingdom of God and of human experience, and St. Gregory of Palamas' stress in Orthodox tradition on the distinction yet unity of God's Essence and the workings of the uncreated energies. That was related also to St. Maximus' teachings on the ''logoi'' of the Logos, which again has been more deeply explored in recent theological scholarship than in Fr. Florovsky's time. All Frank's works remain relatively little studied in 21st-century global Orthodox and secular scholarship. This perhaps reflects Frank's lack of firm academic and ecclesiastical affiliations abroad (such as those of contemporaries like Fr. Florovsky), where he often had to rely on the charity of friends and refugee aid grants; his precarious situation in Europe as an exiled ethnically Jewish Russian Orthodox philosopher who was legally stateless and a target for the Nazi Final Solution; the lack of English translations of his work until the last years of his life (his first work to be translated into English was in 1946 and he reposed in 1950), and because the nature of his work did not encourage the controversial celebrity of some other Russian emigre intellectuals, such as Fr. Bulgakov and Berdyaev. These factors and Frank's more introverted family-centered life and relatively poor health in exile limited his social networks when living in Western Europe. Besides Jakim's introductions to his English translations of some of Frank's books, 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, as is a [https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/08/s-l-franks-imaginative-conservatism.html short helpful essay in English on Frank's mature social philosophy by Dylan James Pahman.] Phillip J. Swoboda also offers an interpretation of his philosophy as "expressive humanism" in his contribution on Frank to the collection ''A History of Russian Philosophy 1830-1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity'' (2010), while Boobyer has argued that Frank is best understood as an anti-utopianist Christian realist, a kind of Russian alternative to Reinhold Niebuhr in the mid-twentieth century ("A Russian Version of Christian Realism: Spiritual Wisdom and Politics in the Thought of S.L. Frank (1877-1950)," International History Review 38 (2015): 45-65). '''Writings''' Most of Frank's major works have been translated into English, mainly by Boris Jakim. Those in English (with their original publication dates , in Russianor German):
''The Human Soul'' (1917),
''The Spiritual Foundations of Society'' (1930),
''The Unknowable'' (1939),
''God With Us'' (1946),
''The Light Shineth in Darkness'' (1949),
''Reality and Man'' (1956)