Changes

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'' (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 Raised as a religiously observant Jew and , 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 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, due to his Jewish ethnic background, they then had to go were forced into hiding and suffer temporary separation after during the Nazi invasion, due to his Jewish ethnic backgroundconquest.

Frank saw Orthodox Christianity as fulfillment of his Jewish backgroundsteeped in the Old Testament, and as a philosopher he was influenced by several strands of Orthodox-related philosophical 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 the fifteenth century was 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, and his . 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 substance 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.

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 unityin 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 unknowable hidden-but-apprehendible unity of reality in Christ, and cognitive understanding that was individualized. Frankargued 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 that emerged from late Scholasticism. Frank's philosophy finds its context also in an existential awareness of 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.

Highly praised for the clarity of his writing style by 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 praised Frank’s overall contribution to Christian philosophy, while criticizing what Berdyaev called a monism inadequately taking into account the nature of evil, http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1939_446.html. But Frank's views on this Frank’s writings as they relate to cosmology and anthropology arguably are not problematic when read today in light of more recent scholarship on St. Maximus the Confessor's work, which they closely parallel, and also in relation to the application of hesychastic teaching and practice in Orthodoxyto psychology articulated since by Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos and others. Frank’s philosophy parallels Vlachos’ writings in not emphasizing individual personalism in the same way as Berdyaev, but stressing the source of human personhood in the unfathomable “hidden God” of the Cross and Resurrection. Frank in his works “The Fall of the Idols” and “The Meaning of Life” shows a keen awareness of the suffering and disruption of Russian Orthodox life in the twentieth century, amid the unleashing of great evil, which Frank identifies with idolatry as objectification of self and others unto death.  Unlike two other prominent Orthodox philosophers of the 20th century in the Russian tradition, Fathers Sergius Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky, Frank's work never was condemned as heretical; he did not develop Sophianism or Sophiology as did those other two writers, although he shared some of the same influences, but with his own specific intellectual genealogy as noted above. While he wrote hopefully amid Communist and Nazi threats to Christianity of Christian unity, and had connections in the diaspora with the YMCA press in France and at the end of his life the World Council of Churches as a source of financial aid to him as a refugee scholar, he was never active in organized efforts at ecumenism as were some other Russian emigre scholars.