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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 and a biographer labeled as liberal 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 in 1922 on the "ships of philosophers", Frank fled Communism and ended up with his family in southern France, where, however, they then had to go into hiding and suffer 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 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, as well as to other thinkers such as Bergson and Spinoza, although it remains distinctively rooted in the substance in first millennium -millennial patristic eraNeo-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. In Frank's development of social 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.
Arguably, ''The Unknowable'', which updates and summarizes his philosophical work, and ''The Spiritual Foundations of Society'', his articulation of his social philosophy, are his most important books. All his works remain relatively little studied in 21st-century global Orthodox scholarship besides Jakim's work, which is perhaps related in part to Frank's lack of firm institutional affiliation abroad or the controversy surrounding some of his contemporaries, the time of his repose not long after World War II, and his unique refugee situation. Besides Jakim's introduction to his translations, Philip Boobbyer has authored a biography of Frank, ''S.L. Frank: The Life And Work Of A Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950'' (1995).
Of the two other major untranslated works by Frank, : ''The Object of Knowledge'' (1915), based on his Ph.D. thesis, is summarized in early sections of ''The Unknowable'', which has been translated,; and the concluding chapter of ''The Fall of the Idols'' (1924), his analysis of the Russian Revolution, is found at the end of the English text of ''The Meaning of Life''.
