The other. To perceive each human being (image of oneself) as a prison in which a prisoner dwells, with the whole universe around.
Electra, daughter of a powerful father, reduced to slavery, having no hope but in her brother, sees a young man who announces the death of that brother -- and at the most complete moment of despair, it is revealed that this young man is her brother. "They thought it was the gardener." To recognize one's brother in a stranger, to recognize God in the universe.
Justice. To be continually ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when that person is before us (or when we think of that person). Or rather, to read in that person that he or she is certainly something different, perhaps altogether different, from what we read there.
Every being cries out in silence to be read differently.
One reads, but one is also read by others. Interference of these readings. To force someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). To force others to read you as you read yourself (conquest). Mechanism. Most often, a dialogue of the deaf.
Charity and injustice are defined only by readings -- and thus escape all definition. The miracle of the good thief was not that he thought of God, but that he recognized God in his neighbor. Peter before the cock crowed no longer recognized God in Christ.
Others get themselves killed for false prophets, or they read God where he is not. Who can boast of reading rightly? One can be unjust through the will to offend justice, or through a bad reading of justice. But it is almost always the second case. What love of justice guarantees against a bad reading? What is the difference between the just and the unjust if both always act in conformity with the justice they read? Joan of Arc: those who declaim about her today would almost all have condemned her. But her judges did not condemn the saint, the virgin, etc., but the witch, the heretic, etc. The cause of bad readings: public opinion, passions. Public opinion is a very powerful cause. One reads in the story of Joan of Arc what contemporary public opinion dictates. But it was uncertain. And Christ... In fictional moral problems, slander is absent. What hope has innocence if it is not recognized? Readings. Reading -- apart from a certain quality of attention -- obeys gravity. One reads the opinions suggested by gravity (the preponderant share of passions and social conformism in the judgments we make about people and events). With a higher quality of attention, one reads gravity itself, and various possible systems of equilibrium. Superimposed readings: to read necessity behind sensation, to read order behind necessity, to read God behind order. "Judge not." Christ himself does not judge. He is the judgment. Innocent suffering as measure. Judgment, perspective. In this sense every judgment judges the one who makes it. Not to judge. This is not indifference or abstention; it is transcendent judgment, the imitation of divine judgment, which is not possible for us.