Semyon Ludvigovich Frank is a prominent representative of Russian religious philosophy of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, who created his own, profoundly original teaching on the basis of apophatic theology and Christian Platonism. From 1922, he lived abroad, where he became one of the brightest figures of Orthodox thought in the Russian diaspora.

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Reality and Man AST, AST Moscow, Guardian Moscow 2007 5-17-040411-5, 5-9713-3948-6, 5-9762-1510-6

Semyon Frank

Reality and Man

The Metaphysics of Human Existence

PREFACE

In this book I am trying to give a more mature and in-depth formulation of the philosophical system which has been taking shape in my thought for about forty years, and the first edition of which I have set forth in The Subject of Knowledge, 1915 (French translation of La Connaissance et l'Être, 1937). Over these long years, my views, of course, have evolved, but the central intuition of being as a super-rational all-unity, which determines my worldview, has remained unchanged.

The first two chapters of the book are devoted to the elucidation of the idea of reality as a fundamental being, distinct from being as objective reality; the third chapter attempts to philosophically understand and justify the idea of God as the primary source of reality and as the beginning of absolute sacredness. These three chapters have the significance of a general philosophical introduction to the problem of man. The book as a whole, therefore, is an experience of the metaphysics of human existence or philosophical anthropology (the first draft of which is given in my book The Soul of Man, 1917). My main thesis is the assertion of the indissoluble connection between the idea of God and the idea of man, i.e., the justification of the idea of "God-manhood," in which I see the very meaning of the Christian faith; thus, the main idea of the book is to overcome that fatal discord between the two faiths – faith in God and faith in man, which is so characteristic of the European spiritual life of the last centuries and is the main source of its confusion and tragedy.

In general, this thesis, despite the differences in its substantiation and formulation, is similar to the basic religious-philosophical intuition of Vl. Solovyov. I must, to my shame, confess that this affinity became clear to me only after the structure set forth in the book was finally formed in me. The influence on me of the worldview of Vl. Solovyov was, obviously, unconscious. But I willingly and gratefully acknowledge myself in this sense to be his follower. Consciously, my philosophical thought is determined, as the reader who is familiar with my previous works may know, by Platonism in general, and in particular by the influence of its two greatest exponents, Plotinus and Nicholas of Cusa. I owe much to my acquaintance with mystical literature.

From the basic idea of "God-manhood," as I understand it, follows a combination of a sober awareness of the imperfection of empirical being and therefore of the tragedy of the position of the human person in the world with a metaphysical perception of being as a harmonious all-unity, which has its primary basis in the absolute Spirit and the absolute Sacredness. Giving due credit to the element of truth in the acute consciousness of the tragedy of human existence that possesses our epoch, I try to show that it is in agreement with a life-thinking and reconciling religious attitude.

I foresee that my book will satisfy neither of the two camps into which modern spiritual life has split. To philosophers and people of non-believing thought, it will appear to be an illegitimate confusion of independent rational thought with traditional religious faith; Theologians and ordinary believers without reflection recognize as illegal the very attempt at a free philosophical understanding of questions, the only answer to which they find in the authority of positive revelation and traditional church teaching. The rejection of and prejudice against deep, religiously and metaphysically-oriented philosophical thought is characteristic of both these camps and of the entire spiritual atmosphere of our age. In reply to this, it is sufficient for me here simply to say that I follow the classical tradition of philosophy. It remains an indisputable fact that in all the epochs of the flowering of spiritual culture, in the Athenian enlightenment of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. At the apogee of medieval culture in the thirteenth century, in the Renaissance, in the epoch of the rapid growth of scientific thought in the seventeenth century, in the German idealism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, philosophy was both independent and religious, and it was precisely in this classical form that it was both necessary and fruitful for all thinking people. And, on the contrary, a disdainful and negative attitude towards the very idea of philosophy to comprehend the mysteries of existence is a sign of the decline of spiritual culture. Be that as it may, but whoever, as Hegel said, "is doomed to be a philosopher" will not, in all modesty, be embarrassed by criticism based on a lack of understanding or rejection of the true essence of philosophy.