We can be unjust through a wrong reading of justice (Simone Weil).

Simone Weil (Foto y Stencil via Lucas Arrimada)

“Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different, from what we read in him.

Every being cries out silently to be read differently. We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in these readings. 

Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest). A mechanical process. More often than not a dialogue between deaf people.

Charity and injustice can only be defined by readings, and thus no definition fits them. …

We can be unjust through the will to offend justice or through a wrong reading of justice—but the second is nearly always the case.

What love of justice is a guarantee against a bad reading?  What is the difference between the just and the unjust if all invariably act according to the justice they read?

Joan of Arc: those who declaim about her today would nearly all have condemned her. Moreover, her judges did not condemn the saint, the virgin, etc., but the witch, the heretic, etc.

Causes of wrong reading: public opinion, the passions.”

Simone Weil, “Readings”, on Gravity and Grace  (1947).