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S.L. Frank

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The Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher Semyon Ludvigovich Frank, Семен Людвигович Франк, was born on Jan. 28, 1877, 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 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'' the greatest work of Russian philosophy. Yet he is perhaps one of the least known today. A former observant Jew and then 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 a creative conservatism (his philosophical outlook has also been described as that of metaphysical libertarianism as well as Christian realism and Christian existentialism). Singled out by Lenin for exile after the Bolshevik Revolution, Frank fled Communism and ended up taking refuge with his family in southern France, where, however, he and his family then had to go into hiding and temporary separation after the Nazi invasion, due to his Jewish ethnic background.
Frank saw Orthodox Christianity as fulfillment of his Jewish background, and as a philosopher was influenced by several strands of Orthodox-related philosophical thought, including the intuitivism of Nicholas Lossky, Vladimir Solovyov's ''sobornost '' philosophy, and 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 Cuss Cusa in the fifteenth century was 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. Frank like other modern Russian philosophers also was influenced by nineteenth-century German philosophy, and his work includes references to the work of poets such as Goethe and Rilke.
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. In Frank's development of social his philosophy, he articulated a view of society as an interaction of ''sobornost'' (a hidden organic spiritual connectedness encouraging a sense of holistic unity) and mechanical organizational aspects of human life tending toward individualism. Likewise, in his articulation of ontology and epistemology, he highlighted interaction between an objective unknowable unity of reality in Christ, and cognitive understanding that was individualized.
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 that emerged from late Scholasticism. Frank's philosophy finds its context also in an existential awareness of 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.
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