I recently ran across an interesting convergence between Umberto Eco's idea of the "model reader" of a text and this writing on how properly to read Sacred Scripture from William of St. Thierry (courtesy of The Pontificator).
From William of Thierry,
The Scriptures need to be read and understood in the same spirit in which they were written. You will never enter into Paul’s meaning until by constant application to reading him and by giving yourself to meditation you have imbibed his spirit. You will never understand David until by experience you have made the very sentiments of the psalms your own. And that applies to all Scripture.
From this paper I happened across online by Prof. Radford of Fairleigh Dickinson Univ.,
There is an important distinction between a Model Reader and an empirical reader. The empirical reader is you, the person next to you on the bus, anyone, when we read a text. Empirical readers can read in many ways, and there is no law that tells them how to read because they often use a text for their own reasons such as escape, entertainment, or killing time on the bus commute. It is impossible to predict with any certainty what the [mental] encyclopedia of any empirical reader will be like, how this text will fit within that encyclopedia, and the uses the encyclopedia will make of this text and the meanings it will take from it. ... You need to recognize and agree to the rules of the particular game I [the text] am playing. As a Model Reader, you will agree to abide by the rules I set in order for you to derive a coherent understanding of me. For example, consider the problem posed by the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” We know as empirical readers with a particular world knowledge that wolves do not speak. However, as Model Readers we have to agree to live in a world where wolves do speak in order for the tale to make sense. As Model Readers, we must agree to abide by the rules of the fairy tale, where animals speak and grandmothers can be swallowed whole and alive by wolves. As Eco (1992) points out, “every act of reading is a difficult transaction between the competence of the reader (the reader’s world knowledge) and the kind of competence that a given text postulates in order to be read in an economic way” (p. 68).
Of course, for Scripture, being a model reader does not mean merely temporarily stepping into the rules of the game as the Model Reader of a piece of fiction does, but forming one's "world knowledge" by them. I think that if you search St. Augustine's On Christian Doctrine, you will probably find analogs to many of the Model Reader principles contained in this paper.
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