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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'' (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. Raised as in a religiously observant JewJewish 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 indicated was a creative conservatism, which a biographer termed liberal conservatism. His philosophical outlook has been described as articulating a metaphysical libertarianism, but more centrally 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 were forced into hiding and temporary separation during the Nazi conquest.
Frank saw Orthodox Christianity as fulfillment of his Jewish background steeped in the Old Testament, and as a philosopher he was influenced by several strands of Orthodox-related 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 fifteenth century 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. 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.
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.
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),
