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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 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 [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, http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1939_446.html].
But Frank’s writings as they relate to cosmology and anthropology arguably are not problematic from the standpoint of Orthodoxy when read today in light of recent scholarship since on St. Maximus the Confessor's work, which they closely parallel, and to the application of hesychastic teaching and practice in Orthodoxy to 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(along with commonalities), but stressing the source of human personhood in the unfathomable “hidden God” of the Cross and Resurrection. Frank in his works “The ''The Fall of the Idols” Idols'' and “The ''The Meaning of Life” 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 he identifies with demonic idolatry as objectification of objectifying 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.
