'Our enemies' enemies are our friends': Simon's insight

Yves R. Simon

Bob Sweetman, emeritus professor at Toronto's Institute for Christian Studies, has just posted a brief essay worth reading and pondering: The Enemies of my Enemy are They not my Friends? Sweetman mentions French philosopher Yves René Simon (1903-1961), on whom I wrote my dissertation in the 1980s. Simon left France in 1938 to take up a position as visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame, but when the Second World War broke out the following year, he ended up remaining there for another nine years. In 1948 he moved to the University of Chicago but continued to live in South Bend, Indiana. He taught there until his untimely death at age 58. His son Anthony O. Simon (1936-2012) was a great help to me as I was writing my dissertation.

Simon's writings during the 1930s were aimed at fellow French Catholics who believed that the dangers of Bolshevism warranted an alliance with fascism. Simon spent his career attempting to defend a non-Rousseauan understanding of democracy compatible with Catholic social teachings, although he rarely mentioned these teachings directly. The best statement of his position comes in his 1951 classic, Philosophy of Democratic Government. In 1942, he wrote a book, The Road to Vichy: 1918-1938, in which he undertook to analyze why so many of his compatriots had sided with national socialism. Here he explicitly mentions this slogan: "our enemies' enemies are our friends." By this time, of course, he was safely in exile in the United States.

 

Simon nicely summarizes the dilemma facing the French people during the 1930s:

It is as though a hesitating traveller were told that if he takes the road to the left, he will find himself facing a machine gun; on the other hand, if he takes the road to the right, he will find himself facing a sub-machine gun. A machine gun is much more dangerous than a sub-machine gun: the sub-machine gun, therefore, is the lesser evil. . . .  Such is the logical development of the policy of the lesser evil (158-159).

Simon died quite young in 1961 of cancer. Many of his most insightful books were published posthumously, including A General Theory of Authority, which was a major influence on my second book, We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God. My own personal copy of A General Theory is a first edition given by Simon's widow Paule to the oncologist at the University of Chicago who had treated his final illness. I can no longer recall where I purchased it, but I wrote "October 1987" in the front.

Nine decades later, we have come again to the point where we have to warn against the temptation to embrace authoritarian solutions to our shared problems. Is it possible that at the cusp of the second quarter of the 21st century Americans are confronted by a dilemma similar to the one Simon describes in Road to Vichy?

The second figure in my dissertation was, of course, Herman Dooyeweerd, whose thought I compared to Simon's. One Augustinian element of Dooyeweerd's thought has relevance to our current situation: when we are finally able to see through a particular idol, for example, liberal individualism, if we do not direct our ultimate love to God himself, we will tend to embrace a seemingly opposite idol, possibly some form of collectivism, such as populism, nationalism, or socialism. Too many Christians, now that they have come to recognize the false god of expressive individualism, have embraced those who promise to destroy the idol, but without recognizing the idols in their own hearts. It's a cycle that repeats itself time and again, arguably reflecting the ancient pattern related in the books of the Old Testament itself.

There is much more to be said about the nature of politics and the failure of many Christians to understand it and their willingness to risk what James W. Skillen has called "the good of politics" in the interest of winning a culture war. But I'll leave that for another occasion.