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78chapter twoIf the Book possesses the quality of ‘being’ in-and-for-itself, how arehuman beings supposed to deal with it? How should we, being subjectto ‘becoming’ and ‘progressing’, read the divine text? And howshould future readers, whose ‘becoming’ and ‘progressing’ will haveinevitably moved on to a more advanced level of knowledge, understandthe Book? We believe that readers of different historical periodswill have understood different things from the text. Readers of theeighth, ninth, twelfth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries have differedfrom one another in terms of their intellectual capacities andmethodologies. Some have discovered things that others have overlooked,and a third group of readers may have elicited things fromthe text that the other two groups have completely ignored. This isbecause despite its fixed ‘being’, the Book is a text of life into whose‘becoming’ and ‘progressing’ the reader has been absorbed accordingto his own degree of ‘becoming’ and ‘progressing’. This fundamentalhermeneutical principle underlines our dictum that ‘the text is fixedbut its content moves’, expressing a subtle dialectical relationshipbetween textual structure and meaning.The messages that readers receive from the text and the messagesthat they might overlook depend on the epistemological context inwhich they read the text. In this regard, every reading is bound tobe contemporary. A reader of the twelfth century approached thetext with the scientific and social awareness of his time, his readingbeing the most contemporary reading possible at that time; we inthe twenty-first century apply the scientific and intellectual level ofour own age, turning our reading into the best possible contemporaryreading. A reader in premodern times will have used the most upto-dateknowledge available to him to understand the text’s explanationof life on earth. He would have used the model of the fourelements of water, earth, air, and fire which scholars at that timeemployed to explain nature and life. In the modern age, however,we apply the findings of laboratory experiments that explain life asthe basic transformation of hydrogen into uranium, that is, we areusing an altogether different explanatory model. In both cases themost contemporary forms of knowledge have been applied and yettwo different interpretations have resulted. This is because the scientificand intellectual horizon of the prescientific reader simply wasmat or, if recited aloud, its audible expression whose meaning is not ( yet)discerned.