From the excellent Imaginative Conservative blog: “Dionysios Thrax, an ancient Greek grammarian, outlined the hierarchical structure of grammar from the least to the greatest. He began with prosody, followed by an understanding of literary devices, followed by considerations of phraseology enhanced by etymology. At the upper reaches of grammar we find analogy and metaphor, followed by the highest aspect of grammar: the art of exegesis.”
Exegesis has its etymological roots in a word that means “to demand”; we demand from a written work what it is most deeply trying to convey considering its origins, the author’s intentions, the validity and value of its assertions, as well as the range, breadth, and depth of its knowledge. This complete understanding of grammar has long since been abandoned.
Grammar has suffered the same fate as theology and philosophy in this reductive age. Grammar has been cut off from its transcendent and philosophical roots. Grammar ought to embody the rules for the structure of language, which intend to reflect the hierarchical structure of the Cosmos. The lowest level of grammatical concern for the ancients has become the highest in the modern school. Prosody has gone under the knife of dissection to the point that literacy has become a sort of pseudo-linguistic analysis of the written word.
Read more here.
