Background
Frank, Semen Liudvlgovich was born on January 28, 1877 in Moscow.
Frank, Semen Liudvlgovich was born on January 28, 1877 in Moscow.
Studied Law at University of Moscow, 1894-1898, and Political Economy and Philosophy at the Universities of Berlin and Munich, 1899-1902. /nfls: Plotinus, Nicholas of Cusa, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Solov’ev and Lossky.
A ‘legal’ Marxist from his student days, Frank was arrested and exiled in 1899. At the turn of the century, he joined Struve. Berdyaev and Bulgakov in rejecting Marxism, and, despite his Jewish origins, entered the Russian Orthodox Church in 1912. He contributed to the collections Problemy idealizma [Problems of Idealism] (1902) and Vekhi [Signposts] (1909), and was among the nonMarxist scholars expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922. He lived in Berlin until 1937, when he was forced to move to France; from 1945, he lived in London. Frank’s religious philosophy was an extension of Solov'ev’s critique of Western rationalism and his metaphysics of total-unity and ‘Godmanhood’. Frank, following Nicholas of Cusa, envisaged reality as a transcendent ‘metalogical unity’. It is ‘unfathomable’ by analytical reason alone, but can be directly intuited as mystical or ‘living’ knowledge. He attempted to reconcile an avowedly monistic ontology with Christian dualism through the metalogical, transrational character of his ‘antinomic monodualism’. In particular, the existence of evil cannot be rationally explained: its connection with God is ‘antinomically transrational’. The mediating role of Sophia or worldsoul, so prominent in the writings of Florensky and Bulgakov, was rejected by Frank, although he invoked Solov’ev’s concept of Godmanhood to capture the groundedness of human beings in the Deity. Frank denied the literal creation of the world out of a hypostatized Nothing; the world is eternal in ti me. but ‘created’ in its groundedness in the absolute.