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Frank saw Orthodox Christianity as fulfillment of his Jewish background steeped in the Old Testament. 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 writings 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. Nevertheless, he seemed sensitive to criticisms of his work as pantheistic, arguing that it was panentheistically based in the Christian God. His philosophical reflections toward the end of his life became increasingly explicitly Christian. In exile he wore around his neck both an Orthodox cross and a tiny bag with soil from his mother's grave in Russia as a reminder of his homeland.
In Frank's development of social philosophy, he articulated a view of society as an interaction of ''sobornost'' (hidden organic spiritual connectedness encouraging a sense of holistic unity in 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 hidden-but-apprehendible experiential unity of reality in Christ, and cognitive understanding that was individualized. Frankargued Frank argued 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 emerging 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].
