29 Semyon Frank

Semyon Liudvigovich Frank (16 January 1877–10 December 1950) was a proponent of ‘all-unity’, who sought to overcome the polarities in modern thought through a universal philosophical synthesis. His writing combined careful argument, lucid exposition, and breadth of perspective. Zenkovsky judged him the ‘most outstanding’ of Russian philosophers (Zenkovsky 1953, 853). In recent decades many of his works have been translated into English and German; he has also been the focus of much interest in Russia itself since 1991. His work was philosophical rather than theological in emphasis, but almost all issues pertaining to religion in general, and Christianity in particular, received some treatment in his writing. It was in emigration—he was forced into exile in 1922—that his religious ideas emerged in their most developed form. This chapter will focus on this later phase of his life.

Frank grew up in Moscow. He was for a time a pupil at the Lazarevsky Institute of Oriental Languages, before his family moved to Nizhny Novgorod in 1891. His parents were Jewish, and Jewish culture and spirituality made a strong impression on him in his youth. But an exposure to revolutionary ideas eroded his faith, and he turned to Marxism for an alternative worldview. He studied law at Moscow University from 1894–1899, but was expelled for his revolutionary activities and only graduated from the University of Kazan in 1901. He was one of the so-called ‘Legal Marxists’. The main work of his Marxist phase was Teoriia tsennosti Marksa i eia znacheniia: kriticheskii etiud (Marx’s Labour Theory of Value and its Significance: A Critical Study (1900)); but he broke with Marxism soon after writing it. Although he joined the Kadet Party in 1905, his interests became increasingly philosophical rather than political. In 1908, he married Tatiana Sergeevna Bartseva from Saratov; they had four children, the first of them, Viktor, becoming a well-known writer in emigration. A renewed interest in religion, prompted partly by his being a member of the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society, led to his conversion to Orthodoxy in 1912. He taught philosophy at the universities of St. Petersburg (1912–1917) and Saratov (1917–1921), and co-founded with Berdyaev a Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities at the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture in Moscow (1922). His first major work was his Master’s thesis, The Object of Knowledge (1915), much of it written during a research trip to Germany in 1913–1914. This was followed by his doctoral dissertation, The Soul of Man (1917). He also contributed to the volumes Problems of Idealism (1902), Landmarks (1909) and Out of the Depths (1918).

Frank’s life in emigration was split between Germany (1922–1937), France (1938–1945), and Britain (1945–1950). In Germany, the Frank family lived in Berlin, where Frank worked at the short-lived Religious-Philosophical Academy and the Russian Academic Institute. But he fled Germany in 1937, after his Jewish ancestry attracted the attention of the authorities. In France, the family initially based itself in Paris, where Frank got to know leading figures in the Russian emigration and French philosophy. He spent the war years first on the South coast and then in the Isère region, where on occasions he was forced to hide from the Gestapo. At the end of the war, he moved to Britain to live with his daughter Natalya in London; but he found British intellectual life less congenial than German and French. It is striking that as his life situation deteriorated, he became increasingly productive. His early emigration publications included a work of apologetics, The Meaning of Life (1926), and a study of social philosophy, The Spiritual Foundations of Society (1930), as well as many articles in Russian and German. But his main works of religious philosophy, The Unknowable (1938)—written first in German before being published in Russian—God with Us (1946), The Light Shineth in Darkness (1949), and Reality and Man (1956), were written in his later years.

As with Berdyaev and Bulgakov, Frank’s post-Marxist thinking was shaped by neo-Kantian idealism; in his case Johan Gottlieb Fichte, George Simmel and Wilhelm Windelband were particular influences. The structures of his thought also owed something to Hegel (Kline 1995). Lebensphilosophie attracted him: his break with Marxism was in part prompted by reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (Frank 2006); and he was subsequently drawn to the ideas of Henri Bergson and Wilhelm Dilthey. Spinoza and Goethe were major influences. Schleiermacher also interested him; he translated his Lectures on Religion into Russian. Most importantly, Frank identified himself with the Platonist stream of philosophy; indeed his life-work can be seen as an attempt to address contemporary philosophical problems with the help of neo-Platonism. Here he was much indebted to Plotinus and Nicholas of Cusa. He once said of the latter: ‘In a certain sense he is my only teacher of philosophy’ (Frank 1983, x). In his advocacy of all-unity, he also had much in common with Vladimir Soloviev. But although he praised Soloviev’s epistemological ideas in The Object of Knowledge, scholars are generally agreed that Soloviev’s early influence on him was subconscious; and he himself observed in later life that the similarities between his theories and Soloviev’s only became clear to him after his own approach had been formed (Frank 1915, 28; 1965b, xiii–xiv). Over time, Frank’s neo-Platonism was increasingly supplemented by mystical theology.

In his earlier, more ‘idealistic’ phase, Frank saw the world as a system of consciousness. But then through a reversal of perspective, he came to think of thought itself as a form of being, and material and intellectual being as part of a wider system of absolute being or all-unity. Ontology replaced epistemology as his primary philosophical interest. The Object of Knowledge was devoted to exploring the implications of this. Frank thought that as well as knowledge about being, there was knowledge as a living possession of being, what he called knowledge-intuition or knowledge-life. He understood ‘living knowledge’ to be a unity of thought and experience (Frank 1915, 419). This insight in various forms was present in all his subsequent religious thought. Nikolai Lossky classified Frank as an ‘intuitivist’ (Lossky 1951). In Man’s Soul, Frank sought to present the soul or psyche in such a way as to allow for the possibility of knowledge in its intuitive form. In a challenge to Cartesian dualism, Kantian idealism, and contemporary empirical psychology, he assigned psychic life an intermediary sphere between the objective world and higher spiritual forces—moral, religious, cognitive, and aesthetic. The idea that the soul should be understood as a formative principle connecting higher and lower modes of being was reminiscent of Plotinus (Swoboda 1993, xvii).

A helpful starting point for exploring Frank’s thought is his principles of logic. In The Object of Knowledge he suggested that all definitions presuppose an ‘other’; ‘A’ presupposes ‘non-A’, and both belong to a wider metalogical totality, ‘x’, which is the source of all definitions. Similarly in The Unknowable, he argued that all knowledge is derived from a wider, all-embracing reality that cannot be wholly known; the source of all knowledge is something unknowable. Moreover, the principle of negation, taken to its logical conclusion, points beyond itself to a higher transrational unity. Frank saw the world as full of paradoxes unresolvable at a rational level. In this context, it was necessary to engage in ‘transcendental thinking’—which he described not as objective knowledge but ‘immanent self-knowledge’. He called his approach ‘wise ignorance’ (docta ignorantia)—a phrase taken from Nicholas of Cusa—interpreting this to mean ‘antinomian knowledge’. He also called it ‘antinomian monodualism’, a concept he saw as pointing to the triadism or trinity of reality as the ultimate mystery of being. He rejected Hegel’s conceptualization of this theme, emphasizing that the third or highest stage, ‘synthesis’, was transrational and not fully expressible in concepts. He saw the concept of the ‘coincidence of opposites’—also borrowed from Nicholas of Cusa—as another way of making the same points (Frank 1983, 4, 28, 92, 95).

Given these preoccupations, it is not surprising that Frank was attracted by apophatic strains in Christian mysticism, including the work of Dionysius the Areopagite. He praised negative theology for its capacity to transcend ordinary forms of thought (Frank 1946, 40; Obolevich 2010, 95). In a broader sense, he was impatient with ideas implying that God was a kind of object to be found in the world. He stressed that, strictly speaking, God could not be understood as existing in the created sense of the word ‘existence’, even if he could be called the ‘ground’ of existence; and, similarly, he could not be described as morally good, although he could be called ‘surpassing good’ (Frank 1965b, 41, 111). Frank was here echoing the tendency of Dionysius to attach the term ‘hyper’ to some of the names of God. He was critical of Thomism for what he saw as a tendency to assign God a place in the universe. But he also saw a great ‘balance’ in Thomism, praising it for having a doctrine of the different degrees of being (Frank 1965b, 6, 138). He rejected the medieval doctrine of substance, on the grounds that God was something wholly other than the world rather than its substance or substrate (Frank 1983, 270). He also did not see the ‘soul’ as a substance, immortal essence or higher principle; it was not a bearer of consciousness so much as a kind of organizing formative unity (Frank 1995: 17, 149, 156).

The intellectual challenge was to how to describe the relationship between man and God in such a way as to avoid pantheism and preserve the reality of human personality. The result was a doctrine of ‘panentheism’. But Frank did not wish to dispense altogether with the idea of God as a wholly transcendent other. In one formulation, he described his position as one of ‘theism and panentheism’, which was very much in the spirit of his ‘both–and’ approach to religious questions. In his mind, God was to be understood as having a dual relationship with man; God existed both beyond the self or soul while at the same time being intimately connected to it. For Frank, theism was dependent on panentheism; awareness of God’s transcendence was dependent on his immanence. He understood human nature as having a dual dimension in relation to God; God was transcendent to a person as a self-conscious subject, while at the same time being inwardly present in the depths of the soul (Frank 1946, 8, 80; 1965b, 144; 1989, xxiii).

This same ‘both–and’ element is present if we consider whether or not Frank’s outlook contained anything that could be likened to process theology. Frank distanced himself from Samuel Alexander’s idea that being itself was in the process of evolving; he stated that while all forms of being changed, the essence of being itself remained unchanged. On the other hand, he thought that scientific discovery was undermining the older mechanistic view of the universe, thus introducing the possibility of uncertainty and a form of freedom into the way the world was constructed. He was intrigued by A. N. Whitehead’s adherence to the Platonic idea that God acted on the world not through blind omnipotence but persuasion and appeal (Frank 1965b, 77, 214 n2; 1989, 109, 200; 2001a, 358).

‘Reality’ was an important word in Frank’s vocabulary. He called Divinity the ‘primordial ground’ of all reality, noting at the same time that it could not be separated from reality. For Frank, reality was the intermediary sphere between man and God, including within it not just objective being in a material sense, but inner psychic being, ideal being, and spiritual life. The primordial ground (God) was only visible through the prism of this reality. While the primordial ground created reality outside itself, it nevertheless contained this reality in and through itself (Frank 1983, 224). Frank was wary of sophiology as a way of addressing the nature of the intermediary sphere. He criticized the idea of Sophia—the divine basis of what, as creation, was distinct from God—if taken as a metaphysical conception, in its abstract logical form. But he thought the ‘spirit’ of the doctrine was positive, if it was taken to mean the aspiration to make the world correspond to its essence as conceived by God (Frank 2001a, 13). He always believed that the separation between different parts of reality, primary and intermediary, could not be explained rationally; there was an element of transcendence, of ‘going beyond itself’, inherent in reality as such. For him, reality was made up of a multiplicity of human persons in the form of a ‘kingdom of spirits’ (Frank 1965b, 47–8; 1983, 136).

Frank saw the human being as both a creation and an emanation of God, although he also observed that in view of the uncreated element in man it was correct to call the human spirit a product of emanation rather than creation. He found the idea of emanation flawed, but appealing if considered trans-rationally. The idea of distinguishing between God’s energies and his essence, associated with Palamite thought, also appealed to him. In religious experience, he saw people as having contact with God’s very essence; God’s presence, he stressed, coincided with his essence. God was not heard in the stillness, but was part of the stillness itself (Frank 1946, 64; 1983, 232, 268–71). Zenkovsky charged Frank with ‘theocosmism’, suggesting that he did not have an adequate doctrine of creation (Zenkovsky 1953, 872). Whether he would have been satisfied with Reality and Man—published posthumously, after Zenkovsky’s text came out—is perhaps unlikely, for in a sense all philosophies of all-unity by their very nature have a pantheistic tendency. But Frank was clearly seeking to address this problem in this final text, in particular through trying to articulate a doctrine of creativeness. The world, he argued, was an expression of God’s creativeness, rather than the result of it. It was not an event that took place in time; in a certain sense creation was still going on. Man was a co-partner in this creative process, for in creating human beings, God was creating creators. The history of the world was that of the struggle between divine creativeness and the chaos of God’s material (Frank 1965b, 215–91).

The Object of Knowledge contained as an appendix a history of the ontological proof of the existence of God. The essence of the proof, Frank later said, was the notion that the idea of God could not be abstractly separated from His reality, citing as the theory’s best exponents St. Anselm, Bonaventure, Nicholas of Cusa, and Malebranche (Frank 1983, 217). Increasingly, Frank argued for God’s existence on personalistic grounds. He saw every soul as a ‘monad’, ‘small universe’, and ‘image and likeness of God’—Leibniz was another influence here; the soul was a ‘peculiar kind of infinity’, having the character of a microcosm (Lossky 1951, 268; Frank 1965b, 24; 1995, 226). The transcendence of personality pointed to God. The human person, to the extent that it was rooted in an unknowable reality, was like God in being essentially unknowable; God and the human being had the same nature, but in categorially different forms. The only proof of God’s existence, Frank argued, was the reality of personality in its fullness; man could as little doubt the reality of God as his own reality (Frank 1965b, 104, 106, 149; 1989, 68). For Frank, Christianity, rather than the Old Testament or Greek thought, was the source of the idea of man as a person. He paid particular tribute to Augustine for recognizing the unique reality of inward personal being, although he thought Augustine over-emphasized the sinfulness of humanity (Frank 1946, 140; 1965b, 120).

For Frank, belief in God contained an intimately personal dimension; God could only ever be ‘my God’; ‘God-with-me’ was a special kind of being (Frank 1983, 242, 257). There was an element of existentialism here; indeed, Georges Florovsky once described Frank’s thought as a variant of existentialism (Florovsky 1954, 146). Frank himself thought existentialism one-sidedly tragic and individualistic. In his mind, the essence of Christianity was not accessible to the individual alone but to the collective experience of mankind—a point implicit in the very title of God with Us. But he praised Kierkegaard for declaring that man’s being was more primary than his mental life; and he called Reality and Man an attempt to offer a synthesis of existential questions and Christian Platonism. In this same work he criticized Heidegger for promoting what he saw as an isolated conception of the individual. But in a letter written at the end of his life to the Swiss psychiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger—with whom he had an extensive correspondence—he welcomed signs that Heidegger was moving away from that. It has been argued that The Object of Knowledge should be considered a kind of forerunner to Heidegger’s Being and Time (Frank 1946, 124; 1965b, 17; Boobbyer 1995, 219–20; Slesinski 1995, 212).

If, as Frank believed, everything in the world was a sacrament, how could evil be explained? Frank touched frequently on this question in his later works. He defended the doctrine of the Fall, but in a demythologized form, lamenting its loss of influence during the Enlightenment; in his view, it was simply a rightful assertion that the world was not as it ought to have been (Frank 1946, 91, 100, 180, 232; 1965b, 178). Frank’s view of sin was shaped by his broader philosophical outlook. No sin, he thought, could be seen as purely individual. Since the whole of reality was immanently present to each person, the fall of each person was effectively the fall of the whole world, and conversely the fall of the world was the fall of each. But ascribing moral responsibility for the world’s evil to everyone was not equivalent to saying that each person was the cause of it. In terms of its ontological status, Frank argued for evil to be considered a kind of non-existent reality or existent non-being; evil within an individual emerged as his inner life became separated from its spiritual source in true being. He did not believe that theodicy was possible in a rationalistic form; he was eager to avoid justifying evil by explaining it as a means to a greater good. There was a dualism of fact and value in his thought here that echoed the neo-Kantian tradition. He saw suffering as the way back to God, in that it signalled a return to reality. Frank liked to quote Meister Eckhart to the effect that suffering was the quickest route to perfection (Frank 1983, 276–99; 1965b, 225; Swoboda 1995b, 285).

Frank was dismissive of the idea, associated with Boehme and Schelling, and taken up by Berdyaev, that God himself emerged out of some kind of primary Ungrund. He warned against the re-emergence of gnosticism, in the form of the argument that God was not all-powerful—evident for example in the ideas of John Stuart Mill. He acknowledged that it was hard to argue that God was all-powerful from an empirical point of view, but insisted that to the human heart the light of the Divine Logos was so ‘dazzlingly bright’ that people inwardly experienced it as all-powerful and all-conquering (Frank 1965b, 174, 198; 1989, 101).

If it is possible to read much of Frank’s thought as an attempt to resolve fundamental issues in philosophy and religion, it is also possible to see him—especially in emigration—as trying to offer a credible defence of Christianity for a younger generation of Russians uprooted from their homeland. In this sense, some of Frank’s work should be seen as a contribution to apologetics. This is most obvious in The Meaning of Life, where he tried to respond to the apparent meaninglessness of life by suggesting that people give meaning to events by how they respond to them. He suggested that the very concern people felt about the lack of meaning in the world indicated the existence of some kind of higher meaning—a typical Frankian argument. Frank also made a strong case for the power of prayer. He wanted to counter the activist frame of mind; in his mind, too much busyness led to human isolation. The activity of prayer was the sole productive work, he suggested, insisting that a solitary hermit could affect the life of the whole of humanity, and that the work of prayer was more communal than that of the most skilful political operator. Solitary prayer, he said elsewhere, had salutary consequences for the whole world, through releasing powers of grace into it. Here he used the term ‘deification’: ‘Inner “deification” … invisibly pours down on all other people, having a healing saving effect’ (Frank 1989, 120; 2010, 84–5, 93, 96).

God with Us and The Light Shineth in Darkness, books with many Biblical references, were also works of apologetics. In the former, Frank insisted that certain, immediate knowledge of God was possible because of the immanent presence of God within man—traditional Christian doctrines he defended on the grounds of their accord with inner experience. For example, he condemned the doctrine of the literal infallibility of Scripture as a form of idolatry, but defended the teachings of Scripture as validated by experience. He was not dismissive of doctrinal truth, but sought to ground its authority in the nature of reality itself. His understanding of Revelation reflected his epistemology; Revelation, he thought, was knowledge of reality not through mental possession of reality, but through the presence of reality itself. God was Truth itself; and Truth—a form of being coinciding with perfection and light—was not something to be found in the external world. He saw the idea of the Holy Spirit as a way of giving expression to inner religious experience; the Holy Spirit was nothing but the revelation of the power of God as immanent in the soul. He rejected as anti-religious the idea of hell as an eternity of torment, while emphasizing the tragic reality of sin and guilt and man’s need for redemption. He took the view that God’s Providence ruled the world in a way that was ‘mysteriously evident’ to the human heart (Frank 1946, 27, 134, 203, 256; 1989, 49).

Frank also thought the atonement could be understood at the experiential level. He rejected as primitive juridical interpretations of the atonement, stressing the idea that the innocent should be punished instead of the guilty. He also condemned as futile and blasphemous attempts to explain the atonement in a purely rational way. But he thought that there was a higher meaning in the idea of vicarious sacrifice. Since sin was ultimately a collective thing, all men were guilty for mankind’s general sinfulness and bore responsibility for it. Through sacrificial love people often had experience of taking upon themselves the sins of others, thereby through their own voluntary suffering contributing to the world’s salvation. Furthermore, the moral sensitivity of individuals grew in inverse proportion to their sinfulness. All this held clues to understanding the Cross; in his death Christ as one truly innocent took upon Himself the sins of others in order to redeem them, performing a sacrificial act covering the past as well as the future. Gethsemane and the Cross involved God taking upon Himself the whole of the world’s suffering. Personal suffering had a wider purpose. Frank thought that it was only as ‘my suffering’ that suffering acquired meaning, and that each person’s suffering was in some way a suffering for universal sin, for sin as such (Frank 1946, 118, 197–209, 249; 1983, 295–7).

A possible criticism of Frank is that he made insufficient distinction between truths revealed by God and accepted on authority, and truths revealed to inner experience. Another is that he exaggerated the common ground between his ideas and those of the Eastern Orthodox Fathers. For example, it has been suggested that the thrust of his thought on the subject of ‘Godmanhood’ was educative rather than salvific; in testifying to an already-existing divine-human ground in human existence, he failed to stress that Christ’s unique redeeming power came from the union within his own person of divine and human natures (Swoboda 1995a, 238, 244; see also Copleston 1988, 68–9). It is true that Frank tended to stress the similarities between Christ and man rather than the differences. Furthermore, his thinking about religion was ultimately shaped more by philosophy than theology. But his heterodoxy should not be exaggerated. He declared that Jesus was the only begotten Son of God, in whom resided the entire fullness of Divinity, observing that his entire intellectual development had led him to accept Christ’s revelation as Absolute Truth (Frank 1989, xix, 40; 2010, 79). He endorsed the Chalcedonian interpretation of Christ’s two natures (Frank 1965b, 140; 2010, 101). In his mind, a decisive passage in the New Testament was John 14, 7–11, in which Jesus concluded with the words: ‘I and my Father are one’. He had a particular love of St. John’s Gospel and the Johannine epistles. This perhaps reflected the fact that at times he seems to have thought of Christ more in experiential terms than as a historical figure. But he did not doubt the historical Jesus and the message of his revelation in history. Rather, he saw the historical and the experiential as working to complement one another: to recognize the divinity of Christ was the same thing as spiritually to experience the self-evident light of absolute Truth proceeding from him (Frank 1946, 118).

It is clear that Frank’s inner life and experience was discreetly present in much of his thought. He prefaced God with Us by saying that the book was an attempt to say what he had learned from inner experience as well as what he regarded as the truth; it could be regarded as a personal confession to those who were akin to him in spirit. Elsewhere, he stressed that his understanding of suffering had been partly shaped by his own experience. More generally there was a serious-minded, contemplative mood to some of his writing that had its roots in his temperament. In this sense, Frank’s religious thought should be seen not only as a response to contemporary debates, but also as an attempt to give expression to his own inner life. More generally, his concern to describe the character of inner experience meant he was drawn to aspects of phenomenology. He was impressed with the ‘radical empiricism’ of Edmund Husserl and William James, even while disputing the latter’s pragmatism. It is also not a surprise to find he liked Rudolf Otto’s writings; he spoke positively of the idea of the ‘numinous’—Otto’s word for the reality called God—although he thought it too vague to be philosophically valuable (Frank 1946, 11; 1965b, 90; 1983, 210; Boobbyer 1995, 173).

Frank’s religion was ecumenical in character. But he remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate in emigration, in spite of concerns about its compromises with the Soviet regime; when he died it was the Orthodox priest, Father Anthony Bloom, who gave him his last rites. On the controversial issue of Rome’s insertion of the Filioque clause into the Nicene Creed, he adopted a conciliatory stance. For explaining the procession of the Holy Spirit, he was attracted by the formulation ‘from the Father through the Son’, recommended by some Orthodox thinkers (and originating with Gregory of Nyssa); he thought this more precise than the Catholic version, while suggesting that in a very real sense it coincided with it. He wrote approvingly of some aspects of Calvinism and Lutheranism, but thought that both Calvin and Luther denied the reality of human freedom. In the late 1940s, he opposed his son Victor’s decision to convert to Catholicism, but this was probably more a matter of concern for his son’s motives than for doctrinal reasons. Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism (1938) impressed him for its explanation of the incarnation. For a time he was involved in the ‘Hochkirke Vereinigung’ movement in Germany, led from 1929 by Friedrich Heiler from the University of Marburg. The ecumenical movement itself appealed to him, especially the current of it associated with the ‘Life and Work’ meetings that took place in Stockholm. In his view, the finest moments in Christianity were those associated with movements for moral and spiritual renewal within the Church like monasticism, the Cluniac reform, Franciscanism, post-Reformation Catholicism and Russian starchestvo (Frank 1946, 214; 1965b, 136; 1983, 73; 2001b, 350).

According to Frank, the Church had a dual form—reflecting the dual form of human nature itself: it had an exterior empirical manifestation, and an interior mystical form, the latter of which informed and shaped the former (Frank 1946, 246–50). In this the Church was like society itself, having an external form, obshchestvennost’, and an inner spiritual unity, sobornost’. The mystical dimension of the Church he also called a ‘primordial spiritual organism’, or ‘Godmanhood’, by which he meant the ‘merging of human souls in God’. In his mind, the Church could also be understood in a third socio-philosophical sense to mean any unity of human life grounded in faith; the family, the state and professional collectives involving some kind of esprit de corps were all churches in this broader sense. Although Frank believed that each person had a unique path to God, he argued for the ‘unisubstantiality’ of human nature. This led him into supporting the dogma of universal priesthood. He did not mean that churches should not have priests; rather that priesthood should not be founded on the idea that there was a qualitative moral difference between priests and laity. He described clericalism as one of the most fatal errors in Christianity, and rejected on principle the idea of infallible religious authority (Frank 1946, 111; 1987, 54–87, 106–9; 1989, 115, 142).

Frank found much to admire in non-Christian traditions. As with many of his contemporaries, his religious ideas can be seen as a response to the emergence of an interconnected world in which different faith communities lived side by side. He liked Jewish and Islamic mysticism for their monotheism and preservation of the difference between God and man, specifically the Kabbalah and Arab and Persian traditions; he particularly admired the Persian Sufi teacher, al Hussayn ibn-Mansur al-Hallaj. He retrospectively praised Judaism for being a natural prelude to his Christianity, but at the time of his conversion and later in life he suggested that its future-oriented nature meant it had a tendency to become abstracted from living spirituality (Boobbyer 1995, 76). He was also drawn to philosophical Hinduism, as represented by The Upanishads, while rejecting Hinduism’s tendency to submerge the individual in God. He insisted that there was much similarity between high religious experience across the faiths, and in the religious pronouncements of philosophers, thus indicating that religious knowledge and experience should not be considered subjective (Frank 1946, 106; 1965b, 42).

Frank’s ethics, which have been described as a form of ‘expressivist humanism’ (Swoboda 2010), were shaped by his experience in the revolutionary movement. He found the milieu of Social Democracy stifling; Nietzsche’s original appeal had been that he legitimized Frank’s desire to follow his own inclinations. Forever after that, he was wary of ethical perspectives that stressed external obligation over internal conviction. He saw the soul as containing two different centres, sensuous-emotional and supra-sensuous volitional, alongside a third directing principle which he called ‘ideally rational or spiritual’. Self-overcoming in terms of obedience to this higher principle did not involve enslavement from the outside, because this principle acted through the centre of the soul itself and was therefore experienced as free action; necessity and freedom were one and the same. Man realized his freedom or self-determination only insofar as he served divine truth (Frank 1987, 127–8; 1995, 166–7). He subsequently found in Pascal’s ‘order of the heart’ an appealing formulation of the Christian ethic. Although he praised Kant’s discovery of the categorical imperative, he contrasted Kant’s ethics with Christian morality, believing that the former turned morality into abstract principles, whereas the latter was suited to human nature and led to personal wholeness. In his view Christ’s commandments were directed not at actions, but at the inner order from which actions issued; Christ’s teaching was not a law of behaviour so much as a law of inner being. Although wary of abstract moralism, he did not mean to embrace relativism. He thought the world gained its order from a kind of ‘primordial ontological ground’ protecting it against destruction; there was a ‘natural law’, rooted in God’s authority, which people had a moral duty to obey, even if the natural law did not coincide with a concrete set of principles or an unchanging order of life. He saw natural law as a kind of compromise between antagonistic principles, in particular freedom and solidarity (Frank 1924, 97; 1989, 133–4, 172–3).

Frank’s active involvement in politics ceased after the 1905 revolution. But he always retained an interest in political questions, and here, as in the sphere of philosophy, his thinking over time was increasingly affected by ethics and religion. In 1909, he contributed a trenchant article to Landmarks, warning of the dangers of utopianism. He portrayed the revolutionary creed as a nihilistic religion and the revolutionaries themselves as secular monks determined to declare war on the world from their own monasteries. He proposed as an alternative ‘religious humanism’—a concept that was to crop up in his thought repeatedly in subsequent decades. Frank thought the Renaissance and Reformation had promoted the idea of man at the expense of God; events like the rise of Bolshevism and the Second World War were outcomes of this process. What was needed instead, he thought, was a combination of principles, a Christian humanism. This was a tradition he found expressed in Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, Thomas More, the German and Dutch mysticism of the 14th and 15th centuries and Francis de Sales, and in Russia Tikhon of Zadonsk and Vladimir Soloviev. Had this movement been a success, he suggested, there would have been no reason for the rupture between Christianity and non-religious humanism (Frank 1965b, 125; 1994, 2001a, 30).

In his writings on the events of 1917, Frank stressed ethical questions. Following the February revolution—which he welcomed—he argued that the real division in politics was not between Left and Right, but between proponents of class war and moral relativism and those who held to firm moral principles. In practice that meant suggesting that moderate socialists might have more in common with liberals than the Bolsheviks: a liberal-socialist alliance on the basis of common values was the way forward. True democracy, he insisted, could only be founded on a religious ideal of people power, associated with a disinterested service of higher truth, rather than on materialism. In his contribution to Out of the Depths, he sought to explain why moderate political forces had failed to triumph in Russia. He argued that Russian conservatism had lost touch with its spiritual roots and been drawn into using the same mechanistic means of outer violence as the revolutionaries, while he saw Russian liberalism as lacking a positive, spiritual worldview. Frank’s political philosophy at the time was what he called ‘liberal conservatism’, a doctrine owing much to his close friend Petr Struve (Frank 1956; 1986, 226–9; 2001b, 211).

The ethics Franks adhered to in 1917 were also central to his thinking about the early Cold War. In the late 1940s, he argued that Christians needed to become more flexible about whom they worked with in the face of the challenge of Soviet communism; they should consider building bridges with non-believing politicians on the secular Left who yet held to firm moral principles. He thought the differences between faith and atheism were sometimes exaggerated; they often amounted to little more than the differences between a broad and a narrow outlook. He stressed the fact that some non-believers were in practice believers by the way they behaved—a prefiguring of the kind of ‘unconscious Christians’ argument associated with Karl Rahner; indeed, Frank at one point talked of ‘unconscious’ belief. He thought that whoever searched in his heart for Truth was in actual fact seeking Christ (Frank 1946, 42, 51–4, 216).

The search for a spiritual basis to humanism was central to Frank’s social philosophy. In keeping with his wider social philosophy, he saw individuals as acquiring their identity from their relationship with others, with society as a whole, and with God. No ‘I’ was possible without a ‘Thou’; and indeed the ‘I–Thou’ relationship was a distinctive ‘primordial’ kind of being. An encounter between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ involved the awakening in both of a primordial unity. Frank thought modern conceptions of human rights failed to acknowledge this unity; it was a mistake to talk of every person having his own inviolable and fixed sphere of rights. More deeply, Frank argued that a relationship with God, immanently present to the inner life of each person, was the deepest form of ‘I–Thou’ relationship. Here Frank’s personalism overlapped with the ideas of Martin Buber, Ferdinand Ebner, and Max Scheler—all of whom were cited in The Unknowable. Frank described reality itself as a kind of ‘thou’, which came to people in the form of a gift. Similarly, Frank identified the ‘I–We’ relationship as central to all social relationships, although he also saw ‘We’ as more primary than ‘I’ (Frank 1965b, 70; 1983, 44, 141, 149; 1987, 127–8).

Influenced by Struve, Frank came to see himself as a realist in politics, but he sought a ‘Realpolitik’ grounded not in tactical considerations but a religious-moral understanding of the world. During the Second World War he emphasized that love needed to be central to any realistic politics, and that the true victor in the war would be the one first to forgive. This religious realism was given its most mature expression in The Light Shineth in Darkness, a work written initially at the beginning of the war, but rewritten afterwards. Here Frank restated his enduring opposition to utopian politics, arguing for man’s dual-nature and the need to combine an aspiration for change with realism about the world. Like Reinhold Niebuhr across the Atlantic, Frank talked of ‘Christian realism’, by which he meant a political philosophy that combined a vision for social and political change with a consciousness of the world’s fallen nature. He had in mind an active principle, the working of a ‘knight of the Holy Spirit’ towards an ideal. The ‘politics of love’ was another formulation he proposed. He thought a spiritual renaissance in Europe was needed. He was never a pacifist—he strongly disputed Tolstoy’s version of non-violence; his defence of the use of force in some circumstances meant that he can be seen as promoting a form of just war theory. But while endorsing force, Frank insisted that hatred was never permissible. ‘Moral tact’ was needed in order to make wise decisions. In early emigration he distanced himself from the philosophy of Ivan Il’in—one of the ideologues of the White Movement. He can be seen as a gradualist, promoting a kind of inspired pragmatism (Frank 1989, 149, 179–80, 235–6; Boobbyer 2016).

According to Frank, utopianism’s error was that it transferred the function of salvation to the law. He opposed the idea that God’s kingdom could be fully established within the confines of human history; God’s creative spirit was at work in history, but his kingdom could not be perfectly realized in the world as constituted. But he endorsed Franz Baader’s idea that, were people able to look at events in a deeper way, the whole of history would become visible as sacred history. Although insisting that history was not predetermined to progress in a positive direction, he thought of it as a ‘divine-human process’ involving the incarnation in history of the light of Christ’s truth or the continuous action of the Holy Spirit; at one level God’s truth had already been established, while it was necessary to strive after it in another. God’s involvement in the ascent of cosmic being to perfection was a guarantee of final victory (Frank 1965b, 223, 226; 1989, 209–10; 2010, 86). In his mind, the good news of Jesus Christ involved two salvational works of God: an invisible salvation at the ontological level of the individual soul and the world as a whole; and a final conclusive salvation involving the end of the world’s being and its replacement by ‘blissful transfiguration, super-worldly, deified being’. He insisted that Christianity, unlike Platonism, required for its completion resurrection in the flesh; indeed, he praised Soloviev for overcoming Plato’s dualism by including the empirical world within the ideal realm (Frank 1946, 228; 1989, 82–4; 2001a, 10).

Frank had a cosmic vision, which was in turn combined with an element of mysticism. In this respect, it is not surprising that he has been compared with Teilhard de Chardin (Allchin 1965, x). The main intellectual influences on him were more European than Russian. He did not share the apocalyptic or eschatological outlook that was typical of some Russian thinkers of his time (Frank 1965a, 16). But he was like many of his Russian contemporaries in his emphasis on the experiential dimension of faith. He saw philosophy and theology as divided not by a commitment to objective truth on the one hand and blind faith on the other, but by the contrasting spheres of general revelation and concrete positive revelation—a difference which in experience was overcome by speculative religious experience, as exemplified in some of the Church fathers and mystics. The final truth, he argued, lay in a ‘transrational antinomian synthesis’ between the two. Even while insisting that he was first and foremost a philosopher, rather than a religious thinker, it is clear that he aspired to a similar unity (Frank 1983, x, 237).