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In terms of theodicy, Frank in his works ''The Fall of the Idols'' and ''The Meaning of Life'' shows keen awareness of the suffering and disruption of Russian Orthodox life amid the unleashing of great evil, which he identifies with demonic idolatry, in its objectifying of self and others unto death. His biographer has said his approach to evil as inconsequential in the face of love may also reflect Frank's need for tranquility amid the turmoils of 20th-century refugee life. He criticized the Western Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin as a source of the disconnect from experiential Christian faith that he saw as the root of 20th-century totalitarian ideologies and a certain type of heartless Western rationalism, while upholding Orthodox Trinitarian teaching as distinct from Catholic theology. Frank disagreed with Berdyaev's brief post-World War II reconciliation with the Soviet state as naive, seeing the Soviet system as totalitarian evil, although he had earlier in exile defended the post-Tikhonite Moscow Patriarchate's situation under the Soviets. While he wrote hopefully amid Communist and Nazi threats to Christianity of a potential Christian universalism, highly praised the writings of the ancient Sufi Muslim mystical writer Hussayn ibn-Mansur al-Hallaj, and had connections in the diaspora with the YMCA press and the World Council of Churches as sources of refugee aid, he was not active in organized ecumenism, and resisted American Protestant influence on the YMCA Russian youth movement among emigres.
In 1965, some 15 years after Frank's death, Fr. Georges Florovsky, former dean of St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary and professor emeritus at Harvard and professor at Princeton, wrote the Foreword to the English translation of Fran's Reality and Man in which he expressed admiration for Frank's philosophical search but categorized it as overly pessimistic, apophatic, and Platonist, in allegedly eschewing the Cross for a Platonic escapism. Aruguably, though, Fr. Florovsky in his criticism is resisting the rejection of town field of theology as overly Scholastic by Frank, together with the latter's emphasis on Chrisitan existentialism, which partook in effect of the perspective on the Cross of the Wise Thief (St. Rakh in Russian tradition) who "stole Paradise" on Golgotha. Frank's own comparison in Reality and Man of his own central theme to the central focus of St. Gregory of Palamas' work, the distinction yet unity of God's Essence and uncreated energies, relates Frank's work also to St. Maximus' teachings on the logoi of the Logos, which is better understood by Orthodox scholarship in the West today than it was in Fr. Florovsky's era. All his works remain relatively little studied in 21st-century global Orthodox and secular scholarship. This is perhaps related in part to Frank's lack of firm academic and ecclesiastical affiliations abroad (such as contemporaries contemporaies like Fr. Georges Florovsky), where he often had to rely on the charity of friends and refugee aid grants; his precarious situation in Europe as an exiled ethnically Jewish Russian Orthodox philosopher who was legally stateless and a target for the Nazi Final Solution; and because the nature of his work did not encourage the controversial celebrity of some other Russian emigre intellectuals, such as Fr. Bulgakov and Berdyaev. These factors and Frank's more introverted family-centered life limited his social networks in exile. Besides Jakim's introductions to his English translations of some of Frank's books, Philip Boobbyer's biography, ''S.L. Frank: The Life And Work Of A Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950'' (1995) is a valuable source in English on Frank's life and work, as is a [https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/08/s-l-franks-imaginative-conservatism.html short helpful essay in English on Frank's mature social philosophy by Dylan James Pahman.] Phillip J. Swoboda also offers an interpretation of his philosophy as "expressive humanism" in his contribution on Frank to the collection ''A History of Russian Philosophy 1830-1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity'' (2010), while Boobyer has argued that Frank is best understood as an anti-utopianist Christian realist, a kind of Russian alternative to Reinhold Niebuhr in the mid-twentieth century ("A Russian Version of Christina Realism: Spiritual Wisdom and Politics in the Thought of S.L. Frank (1877-1950)," International History Review 38 (2015): 45-65).
