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S.L. Frank

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Frank’s writings as they relate to cosmology and anthropology arguably are not problematic from the standpoint of Orthodoxy when read in light of recent scholarship on St. Maximus the Confessor's work, which they closely parallel, and to the application of hesychasm to psychology articulated by Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos and others. Frank’s philosophy parallels Vlachos’ writings in not emphasizing individual personalism in the same way as Berdyaev, stressing personhood in the unfathomable “hidden God” of the Cross and Resurrection. Unlike the philosophical writings of two prominent contemporary Russian Orthodox priests, Fathers Sergius Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky, Frank's work never was condemned as heretical; he did not develop Sophianism or Sophiology as they did. He shared some of the same influences but with his own specific intellectual genealogy as noted above.
In terms of theodicy, Frank in his works ''The Fall of the Idols'' and ''The Meaning of Life'' shows keen awareness of the suffering and disruption of Russian Orthodox life amid the unleashing of great evil, which he identifies with demonic idolatry, in its objectifying of self and others unto death. His biographer has said his approach to evil as of inconsequence inconsequential in the face of love may also reflect Frank's need for tranquility amid the turmoils of both 20th-century refugee life. He criticized the Western Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin as a source of the disconnect from experiential Christian faith that he saw as the root of 20th-century totalitarian ideologies and a certain type of heartless Western rationalism, and upheld while upholding Orthodox Trinitarian teaching as distinct from Catholic theology. Frank disagreed with Berdyaev's brief post-World War II reconciliation with the Soviet state as naive, seeing the Soviet system as totalitarian evil, although he had earlier in exile defended the post-Tikhonite Moscow Patriarchate's situation under the Soviets. While he wrote hopefully amid Communist and Nazi threats to Christianity of a potential Christian universalism, highly praised the writings of the ancient Sufi Muslim mystical writer Hussayn ibn-Mansur al-Hallaj, and had connections in the diaspora with the YMCA press and the World Council of Churches as sources of refugee aid, he was not active in organized ecumenism, and resisted American Protestant influence on the YMCA Russian youth movement among emigres.
All his works remain relatively little studied in 21st-century global Orthodox and secular scholarship, which . This is perhaps related in part to Frank's lack of firm academic and ecclesiastical affiliations abroad (such as contemporaries like Fr. Georges Florovsky) as , where he often had to rely on the charity of friends and refugee aid grants, ; his precarious situation in Europe as an exiled ethnically Jewish Russian Orthodox philosopher who was legally stateless and a target for the Nazi Final Solution, ; and because the nature of his work did not encourage the controversial celebrity of some other Russian emigre intellectuals, such as Fr. Bulgakov and Berdyaev, given also . These factors and Frank's more introverted family-centered lifelimited his social networks in exile. Besides Jakim's introductions to his English translations of some of Frank's books, Philip Boobbyer's biography, ''S.L. Frank: The Life And Work Of A Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950'' (1995) is a valuable source in English on Frank's life and work.
''Reality and Man'' (1956)
Of Regarding 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''.
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, but his last two (''The Light Shineth in Darkness'' and ''Reality of Man'') reflect his intensified reflections on faith and God's Creation.
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