Faith for an Ideological Age

FAITH FOR AN IDEOLOGICAL AGE

THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF SEMYON FRANK AND FRANK BUCHMAN

PHILIP BOOBBYER*

INTRODUCTION

The challenge of secular ideology in recent centuries has given rise to various forms of religious humanism that have sought to synthesise a Christian perspective with social and political concerns. In the mid-20th century, religious thinkers sought alternatives to fascism, communism and materialistic capital- ism, as well as calling for reconciliation and reconstruction in a war-torn world. Two contrasting, yet at the same time intriguingly similar ﬁgures, the Russian philosopher, Semyon Liudvigovich Frank (1877-1950), and the American spiritual leader, Frank Buchman (1878-1961), are the focus of this study. Although from a Jewish background, Semyon Frank was a convert to Orthodoxy. One of Russia’s so-called “legal Marxists”, he became a prominent intellectual opponent of revolutionary socialism, and was amongst the elite group of thinkers exiled from the USSR in 1922 on the so-called “philosophy steamer”.1 In exile he warned of the threats to Western democracy from both communism and materialism, and formulated, particularly in the 1940s, a social and political philosophy rooted in religious principles.2 Frank Buchman, the founder of the movement known as the Oxford Group and then Moral Re-Armament, came from a very different background. Born into a Lutheran, Pennsylvania Dutch family, he was shaped by the culture of East Coast American evangelism, as well as the Keswick movement. Yet,

* The author is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Kent. His main research is on Russian intellectual history and dissent, and he also writes on twentieth-century religion. This article has also appeared in Russian as ‘Sravnitel’nyi analiz vozzrenii Semena Franka i Krenka Bukhmana’, in Vladimir Porns (ed.), Ideinoe nasledie S.L. Franka v kontekste sovremennoi kul’tury (Moscow, 2009), pp. 229-247. 1 See Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer (London, 2006). 2 For a biography of Frank, see Philip Boobbyer, The Life and Work of a Russian Philosopher (Athens, Ohio, 1995); S.L. Frank: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo russkogo filosofa (Moscow, 2001).

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like Frank, he was worried about the spiritual state of the West, and in the 1940s talked in terms of providing a Christian ideological alternative to fascism and communism.3 In the face of the challenge of a militant secularism, both Frank and Buchman appealed for unity across traditional religious and political divides on the basis of moral absolutes and common spiritual experience. The Russian philosophical tradition is sometimes treated as being apart from the mainstream, having its own particular concerns and origins. Cer- tainly even if Frank was amongst the most European of Russian thinkers, his neo-Platonism did not sit easily with the rationalism and positivism of twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. Yet, speciﬁcally as “religious philosophy”, Russian ideas often struck a chord with Western audiences. The similarities between Frank and Buchman reinforce the sense that Russian religious philosophy should be understood not just as a Russian phenome- non but as part of a more global response to the challenge of secularism. Frank and Buchman did not know or knowingly inﬂuence one another (although it is conceivable that Frank knew of Buchman’s work in a general sense), and apart from Christianity in general, there was no single source for their ideas that could explain their similarities. However, the two men both drew inspiration from the wider non-denominational and personalist tendencies of the early twentieth century, which were themselves shaped by the emergence of a global society, and this partly explains the common ground between them.

S.L. FRANK

In spite of his Jewish background, Frank lost his faith in his youth, preferring populism and Marxism. He studied law at Moscow University, but was forced to leave in 1899 for his involvement in the revolutionary movement. In subsequent years, under the inﬂuence of German idealism, he discovered his calling as a philosopher, and worked in St Petersburg and

3 For introductions to Buchman, see Theophil Spoerri, Dynamic out of Silence (London, 1976), and Garth Lean, Frank Buchman: A Life (London, 1985). Extracts from Spoerri’s book were published in Russian in Grigorii Pomerants et al., Pospet’ za bogom (Moscow, 1997), pp. 39-105.

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Saratov universities before his exile to the West. Thereafter he continued to write and teach in Berlin until, in the face of growing anti-semitism, he left for France, where he spent the war years, before finally moving to Britain in 1945. Frank is now best remembered for philosophical works such as The Object of Knowledge (1915), The Unknowable (1938), and Reality and Man (1956), but he also had social and political concerns. After his break with Marxism, Frank was involved in the liberal Kadet party during the 1905 revolution, although his political activism declined after that. Impor- tantly, he contributed to Landmarks (1909), a famous collection of essays critical of the Russian intelligentsia, in which he attacked what he called the “nihilist moralism” of the revolutionary movement and called instead for “religious humanism”.4 Frank and his co-authors, who included the well- known philosophers Nikolai Berdiaev and Sergei Bulgakov, took the view that lasting political change ultimately depended on a deeper spiritual and cultural renewal, and that attempts to change the world through political means alone would be counter-productive. Frank’s religious and political thought found its maturest expression in the 1940s, in particular in his books, God with Us (1946), and Light in the Darkness (1949).5 Frank’s religious humanism was mainly concerned with how individuals, inspired by Christian principles and the Holy Spirit, could, as he put it in Light in the Darkness, ‘creatively Christianize the general conditions of life’ (tvorweskoî hristianizii obÏih uslovii çizni mira).6 Frank found his way back to a religious faith in the years after the 1905 revolution and converted to Orthodoxy in 1912. Yet it was membership in the St Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society that brought Frank to faith as much as specifically ecclesiastical influences, and the church itself never featured prominently in his ideas. Although in emigration he remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate in difficult circumstances, he stated in 1945

4 S.L. Frank, ‘The Ethic of Nihilism’, in Landmarks, eds. B.Shragin and A. Todd (New York, 1977), p. 184; ‘Etika nigilizma’, in Vekhi, eds. N.A. Berdiaev et al. (Moscow, 1909), p. 210. 5 Light in the Darkness was written in August 1940 in the south of France, and then reworked after he arrived in Britain. God with Us was written in Autumn 1941, also in the south of France. See Boobbyer, S.L. Frank (English version), pp. 178, 188. 6 S.L. Frank, The Light Shineth in Darkness (Athens, Ohio, 1989), p. 220; Svet vo t’me (Paris, 1949), pp. 376-379.

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that his conversion to Orthodoxy had never been a complete success and that although he found something particularly precious in Orthodoxy, he was ultimately “Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant” and none of them in isolation. His religious thinking was thus permeated with a strong ecumenical spirit. God was clearly not just a theory to Frank. God with Us was full of pas- sages that suggested experiences of God; for example, Frank wrote of focuss- ing one’s will on God in a way that suggested personal experience: ‘It is the will to open the soul to meet truth, to listen to the quiet, not always distin- guishable “voice of God”, in the way that we sometimes, amidst deafening noise, listen to the quiet, sweet melody, which reaches us from far away’ (yto està volq otkrxvatà duju navstrewu istine, prislujivatàsq k tihomu, ne vsegda razliwomu “golosu Boçiù”, kak mx inogda, sredi oglujaùÏego juma, prislujivaemsq k donosqÏeîsq k nam izdaleka tihoî, sladostnoî melodiî).7 However, his faith was sometimes a struggle. His half-brother, Lev Zak, believed that his ideas were permeated with the pessimism of classical Greek thought, and that only at the end of his life, when during the illness that preceded his death he had some experiences that he described as communicating in the ‘sufferings’ (stradaniqm) and the very ‘essence’ (suÏnosti) of Christ, did he discover a deeper Christian outlook.8 Suffering was a recurring theme in his religious thought. Throughout his life, Frank suffered from ill-health, and the experience of the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of Nazism made him very aware of the fragility of life. In 1945, he wrote to his daughter, whose husband was killed in the war, that people who had passed through suffering were ‘chosen people’ (lùdi izrannxe), quoting Meister Eckhart to say that those who had passed through suffering had the ‘grace of God’ (milostà Boga). This, he emphasised, was his own experience.9 The ecumenical dimension of Frank’s thought meant that he was eager to ﬁnd a way around doctrinal differences. Writing to the English Catholic magazine The Tablet in 1946 he suggested that in their essential meaning the Orthodox and Catholic versions of the ﬁlioque clause in the creed, which

7 S.L. Frank, God with Us (London, 1946), p. 65; S nami bog (Paris, 1964), pp. 80-81. 8 Boobbyer, S.L. Frank, p. 224. 9 Quoted in Boobbyer, S.L. Frank, p. 173.

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were so famous a cause of division, coincided. In the inter-war ecumenical movement, Frank gave preference to the ‘Life and Work’ movement which met in Stockholm, with its emphasis on the spirit of reconciliation, rather than the ‘Faith and Order’ group which met in Lausanne and focussed on the overcoming of dogmatic differences.10 Frank accepted doctrines as necessary symbols of divine realities, but was wary of excessive dogmatism in theology. Much of Frank’s mature philosophy was designed to highlight the limita- tions of rationality, and so it is not surprising that he regarded belief in God as not primarily a rational thing. In 1944, he wrote to the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, with whom he had an extended correspondence, to say that there was a world of difference between a logical and philosophical conception of God, as expressed in Thomism, and a more personal faith, as articulated by Pascal. The two, he argued, were irreconcilable at a rational level. He also emphasised the importance of having an experience of God, suggesting that the true method of cognition in the field of the spirit was a form of “higher empiricism”.11 Frank’s interest in experience, and inclination to downplay doctrine, helps to explain his interest in non-Christian religions. He once described the Sufi mystic, Al-Hussayn Ibn-Mansur Al-Hallaj (857-922), as the greatest religious figure in history after Christ. In God with Us, he argued that all the great religions contained an element of truth, stating that since for Chris- tians the absolute expression of God and His Truth was to be found in Christ and his revelation, echoes of that truth were to be found in a partial form in other faiths as well. There was something to be learned from Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese and Islamic spirituality.12 Frank’s open-minded- ness stretched to non-believers as well. He believed that many non-believers were in fact allies of the church because of the way they lived, and once wrote that the Christian world should unite not against those who threat- ened Christianity intellectually so much as against those who in practice rejected its moral teaching.13 In other words, the real threat to faith was not so much intellectual as moral. In another letter, to the Russian philosopher

10 Ibid., pp. 196-197. 11 Ibid., pp. 189, 191. 12 Ibid., pp. 173, 191. 13 Frank, God with Us, p. 285; S nami bog, pp. 363-364.

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M.I. Lot-Borodina, he argued that the division of people into believers and non-believers was misleading and that a deeper division was to be found between those who believed in justice and love of people and those who did not; some well-intentioned socialists were really believers in this practical sense, and some Christians were not.14 Similarly, in God with Us, Frank argued that Christians should ally with anybody in whom love in practice lived in their hearts.15 Frank’s ecumenical attitudes and tendency to stress practice over theory came together in his analysis of the nature of the post-1945 communist threat and how to respond to it. Writing in an unpublished post-war essay entitled ‘The real meaning of the conﬂict’,16 Frank suggested that in the modern world, communism was the only “faith” that remained, warning that the USSR’s strength partly lay in the fact that its elites remained com- mitted to that faith. The fact that for all its wealth America had not been able to out-buy Russia in the market of world public opinion testiﬁed to its strength. Frank asked what “other faith” could stand against this destructive force, noting that any genuine faith had to be able to appeal to all people and nations and be in its very essence universal. Frank noted that the pre- dominant faith of the 18th to the 20th centuries had been a faith in freedom, equality, democracy and intellectual and moral progress. He summed this tendency up as an ‘irreligious faith in man’ (bezzreligioznaq vera v weloveka), for while at one level it was opposed to communism, it shared with it a common materialism, and a belief in the autonomy of the individual and the infallibility of the will of the majority, ideas that Frank associated with Rousseau (whom he saw as a forerunner of Marx). Frank was wary of liberal ideas detached from a religious foundation. Frank went on to argue that the real division in the world was not between Left and Right at all, but between those who adhered to a cynical materialism and those who believed in the absolute value and holiness of the spiritual

14 Frank, God with Us, p. 287; S nami bog, p. 367. 15 Boobbyer, S.L. Frank, pp. 190, 198. 16 This essay (’Real’nyi smysl bor’by’), from the Semyon Frank papers in the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University, was published for the first time in Semyon Frank, Ne- prochitannoe: stat’i, pis’ma, vospominaniia, sost. A.A. Gaponenkov and Iu.P. Senokosov, (Moscow, 2001), pp. 327-333. The references to French politics in the article suggest that it was possibly written in the winter of 1946-47.

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principles of life.17 More speciﬁcally, there was a distinction between people who believed in the doctrine that the ends justiﬁed the means and those that did not. Discussing post-war French politics, Frank distinguished the socialist leader Leon Blum from the Communist Party chief Maurice Thorez on the grounds that the former believed that moral principles should not be suspended for political purposes whilst the latter took the view that political ends should take priority. Blum believed in the sanctity of the individual and Thorez did not, and in this there was an ‘unbridgeable chasm’ between them. In fact, at this underlying moral level, Blum’s ideas were essentially no different from those of the leader of the French Catholic church, Cardinal Suhard.18 Blum’s beliefs were testimony to the fact that there were many non-believers who continued to believe in some supra-human distinction between good and evil. The greatest danger of the time, Frank suggested, was the failure of people who really believed in good and evil to understand the nature of their faith. In the case of France, Blum thought that Thorez was just a mistaken comrade, and Suhard saw Blum and Thorez as godless atheists; Thorez alone understood that Blum’s belief in moral principles and the sanctity of the individual were a hidden form of religious faith and that in that sense he was just as ‘reactionary’ as the Cardinal. When Thorez went into an alliance with Blum, it was to deceive him. Frank’s concern was that in post-war Europe some political parties who sought to base their ideas on Christianity were guided by outdated distinc- tions between Left and Right rather than spiritual criteria; in working with non-believers, they sometimes made the mistake of choosing the communists as allies, and at the same time often had an excessively narrow spiritual and religious base because they were unable to attract the ‘the unconscious servants of Goodness and Truth’ (bessoznatelànxh sluçiteleî Dobra i Pravdx). The irreligious humanists of the Left remained hostile to them, repulsed by their clericalism and the fact that the churches had become burdened by association with privileged classes and the political Right. In

17 Frank, ‘Real’nyi smyl bor’by’, pp. 329-330. 18 Léon Blum (1872-1950), was three times French prime minister in June 1936-June 1937, March-April 1938 and December 1946-January 1947. Maurice Thorez (1900- 1964) was deputy prime minister in Blum’s Popular Front government of 1946-1947. Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard (1874-1949) was President of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France 1945-48.

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their battle with evil, the Christian world needed to mobilise the creative enthusiasm of non-Christian servants of Goodness and Truth.19 Writing in another contemporary essay, ‘Soviet imperialism’, Frank warned that those countries that were the guardians of the principles of law and freedom needed to form “a Western bloc” to resist the threat of Soviet communism. Soviet imperialism should not be confused with traditional Russian great power imperialism, since it did not represent a national interest but a set of principles that could not be reconciled with the values of the West.20 Frank was evidently in search of an ideological basis for a Western bloc that could unite Christians and humanists against the threat of communism. Frank’s attempt to go beyond traditional Left/Right divisions to ﬁnd deeper moral and spiritual reasons for division was not a new thing in his thought. In the turmoil of the Russian revolution in April 1917, Frank had argued that the apparent split between bourgeois and socialist political parties was in fact illusory; a deeper division existed between those who believed in law, freedom, and the value of the individual, which included some socialist leaders, and those who did not, i.e. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Essentially, he was suggesting, the real division was between those who thought morality could be expended for political ends, and those who did not.21 At the same time, Frank strongly believed that liberal thinking often lacked a spiritual dimension. In an article in 1918 in From the Depths, the sequel to Landmarks, he suggested that Russian liberalism’s failure to provide an alternative to revolutionary socialism was rooted in the fact that it did not have a positive worldview to counter the attraction of materialism and nihilism, and lacked underlying spiritual principles.22 A “liberal conservative” in his political thought, Frank believed that liberal and democratic ideas needed to be grounded in some kind of unifying and spiritual worldview if they were to operate effectively. In The Spiritual Foundations of Society (1930), which was an attempt to provide that grounding, he suggested that in its deepest sense democracy was based on the “service” rather than the “rule” of the people. True democracy was based not on the greedy, selﬁsh or power-loving desire

19 Frank, ‘Real’nyi smyl bor’by’, pp. 332-333. 20 S.L. Frank, ’Soviet imperializm’, also published for the first time in Neprochitannoe, pp. 324-326. 21 Boobbyer, S.L.Frank, pp. 103-104. 22 Frank, ‘De Profundis’, Iz glubiny (Paris, 1967), pp. 320-332.

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of people to be masters of their own destiny, but a feeling that all are obliged to participate actively in ‘the common service of the truth’ (v obÏem sluçenii pravde).23 Throughout the 1940s, Frank continued to emphasise that history was shaped not so much by economic, political or international circumstances as by the spiritual condition of humanity.24 This meant that the causes of the Second World War were ultimately spiritual. In Light in the Darkness, he argued that mankind would have quickly recovered from the destruction caused by the First World War if the spirit of hate and bitterness and desire for vengeance had not poisoned European economic and political life in subsequent decades. The Second World War was the fruit of the spirit of hatred.25 This was also a theme he dwelt on in another post-war essay, ‘The Christian conscience and politics’, in which he suggested that ‘the spirit of hatred’ was ultimately more destructive than any kind of bomb or cruelty, warning that some of those who opposed Hitler were themselves full of hatred. Frank argued that a politics based on love of all men, including a sacrificial love capable of renouncing egotistical gain for the sake of another’s good, was far from being utopian, but was the only possible realistic politics. The fundamental task of ‘real politics’, he suggested, could be summed in the phrase, ‘The true victor will be he who first begins to forgive’(istinnxm pobeditelem stanet tot kto pervxm nawnet proÏatà). In arguing for a politics of love, Frank was not arguing for pacifism, for he believed that force was necessary in some circumstances; however, it was never right to be guided by hatred.26 Light in the Darkness, Frank’s most mature expression of a gradualist approach to political change, was a plea for what he called ‘Christian realism’. He argued that the basic error of modern times was the idea that human nature did not need any improvement and that the perfecting of political and social structures would be enough for the perfecting of life in general. The reality was that there needed to be a deeper spiritual and cultural renewal and that the main achievements of European Christian culture

23 Frank, The Spiritual Foundations of Society (Athens, Ohio, 1987), p. 148; Dukhovnye osnovy obshchestva (Paris, 1930), p. 262. 24 Frank, ‘Real’nyi smyl bor’by’, p. 327. 25 S.L. Frank, Light Shineth in Darkness, p. 139; Svet vo t’me, p. 244. 26 Boobbyer, S.L. Frank, p. 204.

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had been achieved by starting with an interior renewal, leading on to an exterior one. Christian wisdom involved accepting that there would always be a certain minimum of imperfection in the world.27 Although Frank was wary of utopian ideas, and was often pessimistic about the state and future of the world, he still called for a radical commitment to goodness. He suggested that Christian realism involved ‘maximum intensity of moral activity’ (maksimalànogo naprqçeniq nravstvennoî aktivnostosti) and that Christian activity was ‘heroic’, also noting that that there was no need to become a Don Quixote in order to be what he called a ‘fearless and tireless knight of the Holy Spirit’ (neustrajimxm i neutomimxm rxcarem Svqtogo Duha).28 Frank wrote in the English magazine The Listener in 1949 that Christian socialist and democratic movements had often lacked ‘the ardent faith that can move mountains’ (plamennoî verx, kotoraq moçet dvigatà gorx), and recommended at the same time the Christian humanism of Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus and Francis de Sales.29 In dealing with spiritual causes of mankind’s problems, he placed great emphasis on the role of the laity. In God with Us, he distinguished between the role of the church, which he saw as essentially conservative and working as a guardian of past traditions, and the role of lay people, whom he saw as working to introduce spiritual truths into everyday life. In regard to the latter, he called for Christian organisations of lay people bringing renewal into social life, including Christian unions of different classes and professions, Christian societies for satisfying human needs, and Christian organisations for promoting reconciliation.30

FRANK BUCHMAN

Buchman’s background was very different from Frank’s. Born in Pennsylva- nia, his early religious inﬂuences included a Lutheran pietistic background, the evangelistic culture associated with the Northﬁeld student conferences,

27 S.L. Frank, Light in the Darkness, pp. 218, 222, 179; Svet vo t’me, pp. 373, 380, 312. 28 Boobbyer, S.L. Frank, p. 209. 29 Boobbyer, S.L. Frank, p. 210. Elsewhere Frank suggested that Thomas More and Tikhon Zadonskii were good examples of Christian humanists (ibid). 30 Boobbyer, S.L. Frank, p. 199.

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the American YMCA, and the Keswick Convention.31 Particularly important in his religious formation was a visit to Keswick in 1908, where he had what he later called an ‘experience of the Cross’ following a talk by the English charismatic preacher, Jessie Penn-Lewis.32 From 1907-1915, he worked as YMCA secretary at Penn State University, and from 1916-1922, he was Lecturer in Personal Evangelism at Hartford College in Connecticut, USA. The Oxford Group (OG), which originated from his work with students in Oxford in 1921, spread rapidly in Northwest Europe and North America in particular, and was also influential in South Africa. It stressed conviction of sin, surrender to God, “sharing” for confession and witness, restitution, the guidance of God and absolute moral standards (honesty, purity, unselfish- ness, and love); and it also suggested that God had a plan for each person’s life, and that personal change could lead to national change.33 In the mid- 1930s, Buchman organised successful campaigns in Norway, Denmark and Switzerland. However, attempts to bring spiritual renewal to Nazi Germany, including the country’s leadership, were less effective and also controversial; some critics accused Buchman of being pro-Nazi – a charge later shown to be unfounded.34 Buchman launched a programme of ‘moral re-armament’ in 1938 as an alternative to military re-armament, and his work subsequently became known under that title. His speeches from the mid-1930s onwards reflected a consistent attempt to express age-old religious insights in terms that were relevant to the deteriorating international situation and the need for reconstruction after the war. Unlike the Russian philosophers, Buchman was suspicious of too much intellectualism. Partly influenced by one of his mentors, H.B. Wright, a classicist at Yale University, Buchman came to believe that people’s doubts

31 The Northfield student conferences were initiated by the American preacher, D.L. Moody (1837-1899); the Keswick conventions, started in 1875 in the Cumbrian town of Keswick in Britain, stressed the importance of having a transformative experience of Christ and his saving power. 32 Jessie Penn-Lewis (1861-1929). Influential English evangelist with a charismatic emphasis. 33 See Layman with a Notebook, What is the Oxford Group? (New York, 1933). 34 The evidence is very clear on this. Buchman did say that Nazi Germany might be a potential bulwark against Soviet communism, but he was never sympathetic to Nazi doctrines. In fact Gestapo reports of 1936 and 1939 warned that the OG was an enemy of National Socialism. For details, see Lean, Frank Buchman, chapters 19-21.

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about faith were sometimes a mask for moral weaknesses and defeats; when people became free of their sins, they would start to believe.35 Thus, although large numbers of people found a Christian faith through Buchman’s influence, he rarely sought to convert people to Christianity as such. Buchman placed the emphasis not on getting people to believe certain things but on facilitating the change of heart, confession of sin and restitution for past wrongs that might give rise to a different perspective. Buchman’s spirituality also had a strong relational component: people were encouraged to confront and put right dishonest relationships in their lives; and supporters of the OG were encouraged to belong to small fellowship groups, where they could share their needs, and collaborate together in bringing a new spirit to society. Alcoholics Anonymous, which reflected a similar spirituality, was in fact a spin-off of Buchman’s work.36 Perhaps inevitably, the OG was non-denominational in nature. Its teaching offered a philosophy of life rather than a spe- cific theology, and Buchman encouraged people to go to their own churches for a clearer theological training. There was a strong moral emphasis in Buchman’s ideas, but it would be wrong to interpret his philosophy as a kind of moralism. He called in 1943 for an emphasis on ‘morals plus the saving power of Jesus Christ’,37 and strongly stressed that people only changed through the grace of God. Faith in Christ played a central role in his thinking. Returning from the USA to Europe in 1946, he said: ‘We are in a global effort to win the world to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. There is your ideology.’38 He made frequent references to the Cross of Christ in his speeches, often calling for a revolution under the Cross to transform the world.39 At the end of his life he stated that he lived for one thing only and that was to ‘make Jesus Christ regnant

35 Henry Burt Wright (1877-1924), a professor of classics at Yale University 1903-23, was much involved in the work of the YMCA during the First World War. Wright’s The Will of God and a Man’s Lifework (New York, 1909), in which there was a comprehensive presentation of the idea of absolute moral standards, impressed Buchman. Wright derived some of his thinking about absolute moral standards from Robert Speer’s The Principles of Jesus (New York, 1902 ), particularly pp. 33-36. 36 See Lean, Frank Buchman, chapter 14. 37 Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 144. 38 Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 336. 39 Buchman, Remaking the World, pp. 41, 132, 148.

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in the life of every person I meet’.40 However, he seems to have distinguished between Christianity and Christ and, although in the interwar period he had great inﬂuence in church circles, from the 1940s onwards Moral Re- Armament (MRA) increasingly operated in a non-ecclesiastical framework. The fact that Buchman presented a philosophy of life rather than a theology helps to explain the fact that his work also appealed to non-Christians. Encountering people from other faith backgrounds, Buchman habitually sought to encourage them in what they were doing without trying to convert them to Christianity. For example, he was an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, whom he met in India in 1915, and he once remarked on Gandhi’s qualities of “sainthood”;41 talking of MRA in 1948, he said it was a road down which ‘Catholic, Jew and Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Confucianist’ could walk together;42 and he said in 1955 that the Muslim world could be a ‘girder of unity for all civilisation’.43 In the post-war era, MRA groups, using conferences, travelling plays, and personal contact, sought to inject a spiritual dynamic into the process of decolonisation, and in many African and Asian countries they attracted support and direct involvement from people of Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim background.44 Buchman also worked with people who had no religious afﬁliation. For example, in the MRA campaigns to bring a new spirit of dialogue into post-war European industry in the 1950s, Buchman worked closely with the leader of the French textile unions, Maurice Mercier, who was outside any religious tradition.45 Buchman was fascinated by the larger issues facing mankind, and as early as 1915 encouraged his followers to have a global perspective and to ‘think in continents’.46 As a prominent historian of the OG has said, its work moved increasingly in the 1930s from endorsing a revivalist personalism to

40 Peter Howard, Frank Buchman’s Secret (London, 1961), p. 8. 41 Lean, Frank Buchman, pp. 45, 120, 408 42 Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 166. 43 Ibid., p. 223. 44 On MRA and decolonisation, see Philip Boobbyer, ‘Moral Re-Armament in Africa in the Era of Decolonisation’, in Missions, Nationalism and the End of Empire, ed. B.Stanley (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2004), pp. 212-236. 45 Michel Sentis, ‘France and the Expansion of Buchman’s Faith’, in The Worldwide Legacy of Frank Buchman, compiled by Archie Mackenzie & David Young (Caux, Swit- zerland, 2008), p. 63 46 Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 44.

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a social personalism on a national and supranational level.47 On the eve of the Second World War, he was trying to articulate what he called a ‘world philosophy adequate for world crisis’, by which he meant a philosophy capable of creating a new era of constructive relationships between men and nations, and a new statesmanship inspired by a higher quality of thinking and living. It would emerge, Buchman suggested, as people began to get their direction from ‘the living God’.48 Buchman also wanted his message to be comprehensible to all; in a letter of 1936, he talked of the “sin” of not putting out a message that could be understood by everybody.49 Buchman’s world philosophy was based on the idea that people could change. Indeed, he stated in 1934 that civilisation depended on it: ‘Apart from changed lives no civilisation can endure.’50 A change in individuals would lead to change in the world, he said in a BBC broadcast in 1938: ‘New men – new homes – new industry – new nations – a new world.’51 Buchman called for ‘a revolution in human nature’ that could address national and international problems, and evidently saw in this an alternative to fascism and communism because he described it as a ‘revolution to cure revolution’.52 He was very much an optimist about the possibility of people changing, for he wrote in his private diary in 1922, ‘The furniture of a man’s mind can be changed in an instant’.53 At the same time, he was also a realist, and talked in 1943 about the ‘spadework with individuals that brings change’, implicitly accepting the fact that the growth and transformation of people’s souls took time and care.54 Prior to the Second World War and after, Buchman also sought to rethink the nature of democracy, clearly believing that it was an idea in crisis. Like Frank, he believed that democracy depended on a higher moral and spiritual framework. Speaking in the Swedish city of Visby in 1938, he emphasised

47 Anders Jarlert, The Oxford Group, Group Revivalism, and the Churches in Northern Europe, 1930-1945, with Special Reference to Scandinavia and Germany (Lund, 1995), p. 65. 48 Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 107. 49 Lean, Fran Buchman, p. 254. 50 Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 5. 51 Ibid., p. 80. 52 Ibid., pp. 12, 37. 53 Lean, Frank Buchman, 101. 54 Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 144.

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that democracy was not simply a matter of people doing what they liked, and the following year he warned that an increasing number of citizens in democratic states were unwilling to acknowledge in speech and action ‘those inner authorities on which the life of democracy depends’. What was needed, he suggested, was a ‘new pattern of democracy’ which would be based on people listening to the voice of God and doing his will.55 Buchman was particularly hostile to a materialistic conception of democracy, declaring materialism to be ‘democracy’s greatest enemy’. Indeed, he described materialism in 1940 as ‘the chief “ism” we have to combat and conquer’, and the ‘mother of all the “isms”’.56 The idea of God’s guidance was clearly a central feature of Buchman’s emerging world philosophy. Buchman owed his thinking about divine inspiration to a British Baptist minister, F.B. Meyer, who was involved in the Keswick movement. Meyer visited Buchman while he was working at Penn State University, encouraging him to spend time every day listening to God and seeking His inspiration, and it had a dramatic impact on the effective- ness of Buchman’s work.57 Buchman believed that divine guidance was avail- able not only to people who were concerned about personal problems and questions, but also to people dealing with national and international issues. Anybody could listen to God, whatever their background or creed. In a speech in Interlaken in 1938, Buchman declared: ‘Every man in every land should listen to guidance. For every home, in every land, the natural and normal thing should be to get their programme from God. In industry, in the workshop, in the nation’s life, in Parliament, the normal thing is to listen to God. Each nation expresses it in its own way… but all God-controlled and God-led.’58 Buchman’s articulation of guidance reﬂected his desire to be as universal as possible in his expression. As his main biographer observed, ‘[Buchman] expressed his relationship with God in terms which anyone could understand, by reducing it to a matter of Speaker and listener.’ He often used contemporary metaphors in his speeches, for example, comparing God’s illu- mination to Edison’s light bulb bringing light into every home.59

55 Ibid., pp. 55, 87, 91. 56 Ibid., pp. 141, 126. 57 F.B. Meyer (1847-1929), author of The Secret of Guidance (New York, 1896). 58 Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 63. 59 Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 171.

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In seeking to articulate a universal message that could appeal to all, Buch- man started to describe MRA as an ‘ideology’ in 1943. Initially Buchman was negative about the word “ideology”, preferring to describe MRA as a big idea, but while convalescing from an illness during the Second World War he came to the conclusion that the word ideology implied a compre- hensiveness of commitment that the word “religion” had lost through the half-heartedness of many religious believers. Henceforth he began to talk of MRA in ideological terms. For example, in making a call for a world philosophy at the end of the war, Buchman expressed a wish that MRA would become the world philosophy, stating that there were three ideologies battling for control in the world: fascism, communism and MRA, which he called ‘the centre of Christian democracy’.60 Like Frank, Buchman was seeking to re-position the ideological battle-line between East and West away from a traditional Left-Right divide; in his view the essential ideological divide was between materialist ideas, both on the Left and the Right, and moral and spiritual ideas present at the heart of world’s great faiths.61 Speaking in 1943, he stated: ‘People get confused as to whether it is a question of being Rightist or Leftist. But the one thing we really need is to be guided by God’s Holy Spirit…. The true battle-line in the world today is not between class and class, not between race and race. The battle is between Christ and anti-Christ.’62 Buchman emphasised the possibility of class unity rather than class war; he often referred to people from management and labour backgrounds who had learned to work together and become free of mutual antagonism, and he thus asserted that the class struggle was being superseded.63 Buchman’s stress on the moral and spiritual foundations of politics was very evident in his attitude to communism. Communism, in his view, was derived from what he called ‘moral Bolshevism’, which he understood to mean materialism and a revolt against God and his absolute moral standards; and in this sense – as materialism – communism was something that was to be found in people who were not consciously communist at all. On a visit

60 Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 146. 61 Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 321. 62 Quoted in Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 321. 63 Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 177.

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to South America in 1931, Buchman complained of the half-hearted Chris- tianity and ‘moral Bolshevism’ of the upper classes.64 Some decades later, responding to a woman who said that the bad moods and moral compro- mises that were a feature of her marriage were as bad as communism, Buch- man replied, ‘As bad a Communism? They are Communism’.65 Connected with this, Buchman believed that communism advanced by exploiting people’s moral weaknesses. In a speech some months before his death in 1961, he stated that communism advanced when people’s moral fences had been destroyed: ‘It edges forwards through the soft spots in men’s characters…. a man who can be bought with women, men, drink, position, power, will be used by Communism in its bid for control.’66 At the same time, Buchman always emphasised that people could change, and MRA went out of its way to try to appeal to communists by arguing that their ideology of class war was outdated. For example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, groups of MRA workers went into the Ruhr, to try to promote MRA as a ‘superior ideology’ to German workers, many of them members of the Communist Party.67 A distinction was sometimes made between communists who were motivated by genuine idealism and communists whose beliefs were the result of some deeper moral compromise; this was evident, for example, in the plays of Peter Howard, Buchman’s successor as leader of MRA after he died in 1961.68 If class conciliation was a focus of Buchman’s work, so also was international reconciliation. After 1945, his work became particularly well-known for its attempts to foster Franco-German reconciliation. Groups of MRA supporters went into Germany and France, preaching a message of personal change and class and national reconciliation, and many German and French leaders visited the MRA centre in Caux, Switzerland.69 Great emphasis was placed on the role of ‘forgiveness’ in the reconstruction of Europe. In a particularly

64 Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 148. 65 Cited in Philip Boobbyer, ‘The Cold War in the Plays of Peter Howard’, Contemporary British History, 19,2 (2005), p. 208. 66 Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 277. 67 See Lean, Frank Buchman: a Life, chapter 32. 68 Boobbyer, ‘The Cold War in the Plays of Peter Howard’, p. 213. 69 See on this Edward Luttwak, ‘Franco-German Reconciliation: The Overlooked Role of the Moral Re-Armament Movement’, in Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft, eds. D. Johnson and C. Sampson (New York, 1994), pp. 37-63.

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striking case in 1948, the Secretary General of the national organisation of French women in France, Irène Laure, was prompted by Buchman to repent of her hatred of Germany. She made a public apology in Caux, stating: ‘I have so hated Germany that I wanted to see her erased from the map of Europe. But I have seen here that my hatred is wrong. I want to ask the forgiveness of all the Germans present.’ The statement had a dramatic effect on the Germans who heard it, prompting them to examine and acknowledge honestly their own wartime history.70 Laure subsequently travelled through Germany, asking forgiveness for her previous attitudes and calling for reconciliation between France and Germany. A similar message of honesty, forgiveness and reconciliation was also promoted in Africa and Asia. In these cases, traditional Christian insights were re-formulated to relate to particular political problems or ethnic disputes. It was important to express traditional truths in words and images that people could understand. Furthermore, just as in Frank’s teaching, the spiritual renewal was to be car- ried forward by laypeople. Inspired by Buchman’s model, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister and prime minister, wrote in the French edition of Remaking the World that what was needed was a school where Christian principles could be applied to the overcoming of prejudices and enmities separating classes, races and nations, and that Buchman’s work was in the process of providing trained men, ready for the service of the state, ‘apostles of reconciliation and builders of a new world’.71 It is impossible to read any account of Buchman’s life without encountering stories of his impact on individuals. He believed that everyone’s spiritual journey was unique, and thus that great sensitivity was needed to discern what each person needed at a particular time; only the Holy Spirit could provide that wisdom. He challenged Irène Laure, for example, to turn from her hatred, and that was the gateway to a life of religious faith. In another case, involving a German communist, Buchman encouraged a more overtly “Christian” experience – but not immediately. Max Bladeck, chairman of the works council in one of the mines of the Ruhr in Germany, met Buchman’s

70 See Lean, Frank Buchman, pp. 352-353. See also Jacqueline Piguet, For the Love of Tomorrow (London, 1985). 71 Quoted in Robin Mowat, Decline and Renewal (Oxford, 1991), p. 300. Robert Schu- man (1886-1963) was twice French prime minister in the years 1947-48.

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work in 1949 and was attracted by evidence that class conciliation could be a reality. However, his former communist comrades then trapped him in a compromising situation with a woman who was not his wife and he was so embarrassed that he decided to distance himself from MRA. Buchman sent him a cable with an encouraging message stating that people could be renewed and cleansed by the blood of Christ. The message affected Bladeck so profoundly that he turned towards Christianity.72 Bladeck’s “change” took place over time, starting with a moral awakening, and then moving on to a religious experience, and this was often the case with people who met Buch- man. Buchman believed that only when people had a profound insight into their own personal needs and fragility could they ﬁnd a deep Christian experience; at an individual level, it was a mistake to present a speciﬁcally Chris- tian message to people before they were ready for it.

COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Frank and Buchman clearly had many common concerns. Both men sought to relate their faith to the ideological challenges of the time. They both saw the possibility of inter-denominational co-operation, and recognised positive tendencies in non-Christian and sometimes non-religious people or groups. Essentially, they challenged Christians of all denominations to think strategi- cally about the essentials of their faith, and to build alliances with people whom they would ordinarily regard as their competitors or even opponents. They both believed that lasting political change in the world could only result from a moral and spiritual renewal, and stressed the need for change in human nature; and they also sought to ground democracy in a spiritual as opposed to materialistic framework. In addition, they also saw the value of an experience of forgiveness for the overcoming of hatred between nations. Both Frank and Buchman questioned the rightness of seeing Left-Right divisions as a guide to the ideological war in the world, and found a deeper divide in people’s attitudes to absolute moral values. In essence, both men shifted the focus away from class or race, or political or religious afﬁliation to stress the moral importance of the individual. Frank argued that the divide lay between those who believed in eternal values and those who were ready

72 Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 367.

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to suspend morality for political gain. Although Buchman expressed it in a less philosophical terminology, he was saying something very similar. Both men also stressed what people did rather than what they said as a guide to their ultimate beliefs. This emphasis on ethics and practical behaviour, rather than doctrine, facilitated inter-denominational and inter-religious dialogue. At the same time, it would be wrong to isolate the moral component in the thinking of these ﬁgures from the spiritual dimension. They were not ultimately moralists in any narrow sense, and their moral vision was rooted in each case in a larger religious worldview in which Christ remained central. Although Frank was a Russian philosopher, his intellectual journey owed much to European, and particularly German philosophy. In this sense, it is important not to see him only as a representative of Russian thought. The comparison with Buchman reinforces the sense that he should be seen in a larger, global context. A Marxist in his youth, Frank’s turn to Christianity was in many ways a reaction to the all-embracing claims of the Marxist worldview. It was thus not surprising that his ideas were often couched in terms of a world philosophy. Buchman’s attempt to create an ideological alternative to fascism, communism and materialism was in some ways similar. If Frank’s ethics were in part a response to Marxism and initially drawn from German idealism, Buchman derived his moral ideas from a Protestant culture that was more orientated towards the Bible. Yet he too was shaped by the ideological currents of his time, and constructed his world philosophy in response to them. While Frank called for a “faith” that could stand up to communism, and Buchman expressed the need for a new “ideology”, they were searching after something very similar. In a wider sense, both men were seeking to respond to the increasing inter-connectedness of the world, and the global society that was being shaped by new technologies and the inﬂu- ence of Europe and the United States. It would be wrong to assume that the common insights of Frank and Buchman must have come from the same source. The two men arrived at their ideas independently. At the same time, there are some intriguing over- laps in their network of contacts, especially in the West, that suggest not so much a common source for their ideas as the existence of a larger international inter-denominational network of which they were a part. For example in his early years Buchman had a lot of contact with John Mott, the General Secretary of the American YMCA from 1915-28, and it was Mott’s

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YMCA in Berlin that provided funding for the founding of the Religious- Philosophical Academy that Frank and Berdyaev started in Berlin in autumn 1922.73 In addition, Buchman was a friend of Swedish Archbishop Nathan Söder blom, and Söderblom was the founder of the ‘Life and Work’ section of the ecumenical movement that Frank particularly admired.74 Frank and Buchman’s interest in non-Christian traditions also reflected a wider tendency. Indeed, their ideas suggest a belief in the existence of what Catho- lic theologian Karl Rahner called ‘anonymous Christians’, people who had not heard of Christianity, or even rejected it, but who in their basic orien- tation had accepted the Christian revelation (although there is no evidence of a direct influence from Rahner on Frank or Buchman).75 Frank himself referred to the existence of what he called ‘unconscious Christians’ in God with Us.76 There were also personalist currents in the thinking of the two men. In the mid-1920s, Frank developed a social philosophy that emphasised the importance of the ‘I-We’ relationship, which bore some similarity to the ideas in Martin Buber’s I and Thou, and in The Unknowable Frank mentioned Buber, Max Scheler and Ferdinand Ebner for their work in this field.77 In Paris in 1939, Frank also had links with the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel, whose philosophy also reflected personalist themes. Intrigu- ingly, Marcel got much involved in the work of MRA after the Second World War, editing and introducing a positive compendium of stories about its work under the title of Fresh Hope for the World.78 The personalist Swiss psychiatrist, Paul Tournier, also owed some of his key insights and life to

73 Lean, Frank Buchman, pp. 33. 45; Paul Anderson, No East or West (Paris, 1985), p. 40. 74 Lean, Frank Buchman, pp. 121, 179, 416. Nathan Söderblom (1866-1931), Arch- bishop of Uppsala, 1914-1931. 75 Karl Rahner, 1904-1984, Catholic theologian whose ideas influenced the Second Vatican Council. 76 S.L. Frank, God with Us, p. 287; S nami bog, p. 367. 77 S.L. Frank, The Unknowable (Athens, Ohio, 1983), p. 141; Sochineniia (Moscow, 1990), p. 598. Martin Buber (1878-1965), Jewish theologian, author of I and Thou (1923); Max Scheler (1874-1928), German philosopher with an interest in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology; Ferdinand Ebner (1882-1931), philosopher who developed a religiously-based linguistic philosophy. 78 Gabriel Marcel (ed.), Fresh Hope for the World: Moral Re-Armament in Action (London, 1960); translated from the French edition, Un Changement d’Espérance à la Rencontre du Réarmament Morale (Paris, 1958).

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the influence of the OG.79 The existence of personalist currents of thought both in the Russian philosophical tradition and in Buchman’s work is high- lighted by the fact that the modern Russian philosopher Grigorii Pomerants wrote a very positive account of Buchman’s work, in which he drew particular attention to Marcel’s account of MRA.80 Yet there were also significant differences between Frank and Buchman. At one level, of course, the two men simply had different temperaments and priorities. Specifically in terms of their thinking, an important difference between them was in their attitudes to God’s guidance. The idea of listening to God was the central plank of Buchman’s ideology, whereas although Frank believed in the reality of God’s presence and the possibility of listening to Him, the idea of guidance was not central in his ideas. In this connection, Buchman had a more radical expectation of how people, guided by God, could bring change to the world. In spite of his anti-utopian emphasis, Frank’s thought also contained a radical Christian vision of social transformation, but it did not have the same immediacy about it as Buchman’s. The two men also had different attitudes toward academic knowledge: a key part of Frank’s project was to rethink and re-express religious truths in the light of modern knowledge; Buchman had less respect for academic knowledge as such, even if he was in many ways a pioneering thinker, and he was impa- tient with theory when he felt it was isolated from real life. It might be said that Frank and Buchman offered complementary insights and qualities. It was one of the weaknesses of the Russian religious renaissance of which Frank was a part that its impact was primarily intellectual, and although it influenced the Russian university world to some degree, it did not have the strength to bring a popular movement into existence. In a sense, Buchman succeeded in realising what Frank articulated on paper, creating a non-denominational movement that sought to bring a Christian spirit into society, building alliances across religious and ideological divides. There were figures in late tsarist Russia whose concerns and abilities could be likened to Buchman’s; Paul Nikolay of Monrepos, for example, an aristocrat who was

79 See, for example, Paul Tournier, A Listening Ear (Caux, 1998); see also Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 153. 80 Grigory Pomerants, The Spiritual Movement from the West (Caux, 2004); in Russian: ‘Dukhovnoe dvizhenie s zapada’, in Grigorii Pomerants et al, Pospet’ za bogom, p. 4 ff.

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the chief representative of John Mott’s work in Russia and a seminal inﬂuence on the great Orthodox preacher Vladimir Martzinkovsky, had an impressive outreach in Russia’s universities and prisons and a similar combination of pastoral qualities and social concern.81 However, the work of Nikolay and others came too late to alter Russia’s revolutionary trajectory. It was one of the tragedies of Russian history that a movement with the combination of intellectual and practical gifts of the kind represented by Frank and Buch- man, did not come into existence with sufﬁcient strength to offer a Christian humanistic alternative to revolutionary socialism.82

81 Paul Nikolay of Monrepos (1860-1919). For details of his life, see Paul Gundersen, Paul Nicolay of Monrepos: A European with a Difference (Moscow, 2004). 82 For more on this theme see Philip Boobbyer, review of Lesley Chamberlain, The Phi- losophy Steamer (London, 2006), S.L.Frank, Saratovsii tekst (Saratov, 2006), Gundersen, ‘Paul Nicolay of Monrepos’, Kritika 8,4 (2007), pp. 897-903.

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