Theosis, Individuality, and the Reception of Nietzsche in Frank's Godmanhood

This paper examines the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche in the Russian religious philosophy of S. L. Frank, arguing that the Christian theological transformation of Nietzschean themes—such as individual freedom, heroism, self-overcoming, and moral creativity—played a formative role in Frank's account of bogochelovechestvo (Godmanhood) and its function in constituting human personality. Building on existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s reception by Russian thinkers such as Berdyaev, the paper traces how Frank’s thought Christianized Nietzsche’s Übermensch and incorporated it into a Solovievan metaphysics of divine-human communion, giving the idea new spiritual significance in relation to the Orthodox doctrine of deification/theosis. The paper argues that recovering this Nietzschean current in Frank’s thought offers resources for developing a more robustly individualist Orthodox personalism and linking individual agency to deification.