Faith for an Ideological Age

Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 61(3-4), 265-287. doi: 10.2143/JECS.61.3.2046975 © 2009 by Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. All rights reserved. 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 per- spective 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 promi- nent 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). 993223_JECS_2009/3-4_04_Boobbyer_ME3223_JECS_2009/3-4_04_Boobbyer_ME 226565 224/03/104/03/10 114:044:04 266 PHILIP BOOBBYER 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 ten- dencies 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, prefer- ring 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. 993223_JECS_2009/3-4_04_Boobbyer_ME3223_JECS_2009/3-4_04_Boobbyer_ME 226666 224/03/104/03/10 114:044:04 FAITH FOR AN IDEOLOGICAL AGE 267 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. 993223_JECS_2009/3-4_04_Boobbyer_ME3223_JECS_2009/3-4_04_Boobbyer_ME 226767 224/03/104/03/10 114:044:04 268 PHILIP BOOBBYER 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.

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