The article presents an attempt to trace, in the tradition of Christian hermeneutics, the origin of an idea which plays an important role in the entire modern hermeneutical discourse, namely – the idea of infinite interpretation. Today, it is regarded as a feature of radical (Vattimo), post-structuralist (Foucault) hermeneutics which questions, in many ways and starting from different traditions of thought and with different premises, the belief that the meaning of a text is univocal, given once and for all, closed, and the work of an interpreter is only limited to its extraction, unambiguous understanding, reconstruction.
However, in early Christian tradition of Patrology, e.g. in the works of St. Gregory the Great, one can find traces of such approach to the interpretation of the Scriptures, in which the reading does not mean discovery of a given sense but its active development: Scriptura cum legentibus crescit, Scripture grows with those who read it. This approach seems to be especially close to Vattimo’s concept of productive interpretation, i.e. an interpretation which contributes to the meaning of the text in the act of interpretation, multiplying the senses of human experience.
