Vladimir Solov’ëv, Sergej Bulgakov, Nikolaj Berdjaev, and Semën Frank shared the conviction that Creation is incomplete: humanity must arrive at organizing social life on an “eighth day.” Thus they prophesied the Universal Church, “social Christianity,” “personalist socialism,” and “spiritual democracy.” Their attempt to avoid any illegitimate confusion between independent rational thought and Christian faith prompted Bulgakov to become an ordained theologian, Berdjaev a “philosophical poet,” and Frank a “Christian realist.” Solov’ëv’s theosophical attempt to philosophically substantiate faith and consequently eschatological prophecy (...) finds itself in the same tragic predicament as Christian faith in general when amalgamated on a one to one basis with the world. I am to show that this is not the case for any of the three other authors discussed, however, much they did adhere to some of Solov’ëv’s major lines of thought. (shrink)

This essay introduces Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank as a philosopher who deservedly may be called a revolutionary thinker: he introduced a remarkable social ontology that foregrounds service. His oeuvre presents service as the supreme principle of personal and hence social life. The singular personality is seen as being there to creatively serve itself: his view of man focuses on the human soul as being there to bring forth creative action—to serve those who will come after, the community, society, and the Christian (...) Churches. Service, then, is the source for freedom as a derivative principle. Consequently, and in opposition to the fundamental idea of the “Charter of Human Rights,” freedom in Frank has no absolute value, but only a functional one. It is justified by the ontological principle of service. All governmental organization is, ideally, the organization of freedom, the planned, systematic formation of free, spontaneous cooperation. Spontaneous cooperation makes up part of his concept of sobornost’, the empirical substrate of social culture. Frank would have agreed with Karl Popper’s notion of the “open society,” yet he would have certainly added that accessibility and transparency, be they spiritual or social, emanate from the principle of the universality of service. The true ontological meaning and the true source of democracy is, in his eyes, not the rule of all, but the service of all. (shrink)