Doctrines and Living Faith

Semyon Frank

From Frank, S. L. God With Us: Three Meditations. Translated from the Russian by Natalie Duddington. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1946, pp 99-100

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I read this book on retreat before my ordination and have re-read it many times over the years. It is long out of print, and very difficult to find, but God rewards the perseverent seeker.

Semyon Frank was a Jewish convert to Orthodoxy, reared in Judaism by his pious grandfather, who was a synagogue cantor; his earliest childhood religious experience was steeped in traditional Judaism. He followed the intellectual path of many Russians in the early 20th century, beginning as a political radical, seeing the flaws in Marxism and materialism, embracing idealist philosophy, and finally entering the Church. He was exiled to the west on the “Philosphers’ Ship” in 1922, which carried many other Orthodox luminaries including Fr Sergius Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev. Taking up residence in Paris, he then fled the capital during the Nazi occupation and lived in hiding in the south of France until the end of the war. Thus his life followed the tragic path of so many great Russian religious figures of his era, and his work, in its more heartfelt expression, is directed to locating the living heart of a gracious, life-giving reality in the depths of human experience — a reality that can be relied upon in any state of outward suffering and oppression. The book from which this passage is taken is in a sense an irenic, philosophical catechism of an “Orthodoxy of the heart.”

Historian Nikolai Lossky regards him as the greatest Russian metaphysician of the 20th century. Frank once commented that “in a sense, his greatest religious teacher” was Nicolas of Cusa — a comment that underlines his profoundly warm ecumenical spirit. He is another exemplar of an “open Orthodoxy,” a different stream from the rigorist neopatristic synthesis of figures like Fr Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky and their successors.

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Once we get rid of the usual, popular use of words and ideas connected with them, we become aware that dogmas — in the only sense that is important for our religious life — are not incomprehensible formulae or theoretical arguments but our actual religious convictions. At moments of greatest spiritual tension — for instance, at the time of bitter trials or in the face of death — we know that for a truthful and responsible religious mind the important thing is not the actual wording of the creed or even agreement with its meaning; the only thing that really matters is that which we know, experience, and inwardly confess as our own religious convictions, as truths revealed to the heart. The test of such living dogmas is their significance as practical guides in life. Our will may be so weak and sinful, so dominated by sensuous ideas and strivings that we by no means always live, feel and act in accordance with those convictions, but they still remain the criterion which we apply to ourselves in judging our life and conduct or trying to improve it. It is not a question of a mere theoretical distinction between truth and error, but of an incomparably more vital difference between right and wrong — between the light shining in our heart or the darkness in which it may be plunged.

Dogmas of faith refer to quite a different realm of being than do the theoretical judgments about the external world, or the practical precepts which enable us to find our bearings in it and to succeed in life. The truths of faith are truths of the heart, the fruit of heartfelt living experience, affirmed in spite of all “the intellect’s cold observations.” As contrasted with “the wisdom of this world” they appear as “foolishness,” but for the believer they possess an immanent inner self-evidence.

We must neither exaggerate nor belittle the significance of exact dogmatic knowledge. On the one hand faith is not thought, but experience of the heart, and in this sense it may be said that dogmas are not intellectual convictions, but convictions which determine our spiritual attitude as a whole and motivate our conduct. A man who is intellectually an unbeliever, but whose heart is aglow with love for his fellow creatures, who is forgetful of self and thirsting for goodness and righteousness, really believes — without being aware of it — that God is love and that one must lose one’s soul in order to save it, i.e. in fact confesses the fundamental dogma of the Christian faith. And if a so-called “believer” repeats the words of the creed with conviction, but is a harsh and heartless egoist, he is really an unbeliever, for in fact he rejects the Christian dogma; if all he can see and prize are earthly goods, he actually denies the existence of God and His Kingdom. Nietzsche has well said of such believers: “they say that they believe in God but in reality they believe only in the police.” A dogma is from its very nature a judgment of value, an affirmation of the value of something. Accordingly, the motives by which we are guided in our practical life show what dogma we really profess. I repeat, God judges not our thoughts, but our hearts. This is made abundantly clear by the Gospel story of the two sons, one of whom expressed obedience but did not carry out his father’s will, and the other expressed disobedience but in fact did his father’s bidding, and by Christ’s words that publicans and harlots will enter the kingdom of heaven before “the scribes and the pharisees,” i.e., before theologians, Bible scholars and intellectual confessors of faith.

We must not, however, fall into the opposite extreme and belittle the significance of understanding dogmas, i.e., of rendering ourselves a conscious account of the faith which is to guide us in life. In this domain as elsewhere knowledge is more useful than profession. And although on the one hand true spiritual wisdom (which finds expression in the living dogmatic consciousness) is opposed to the “wisdom of this world,” on the other it is the only firm foundation of true practical wisdom. The spiritual reality with its laws revealed to us in religious experience is in the last resort the only true determinant of human life as a whole.

Those who have no knowledge of it inevitably build their life “upon sand,” strive after phantoms, and are in danger of perishing. Strictly speaking, we can have no real knowledge of the human heart and, consequently, no sober understanding of life and of the world so long as we are blind to the structure of the spiritual reality, i.e. have no true “dogmas” of faith. Those who have no insight into the depths of reality are in a state of delusion with regard [even] to its material earthly surface.