The Design in the Wax

The Structure of the Divine Comedy and Its Meaning

Marc Cogan

The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies

The most important clue to an understanding of the Divine Comedy lies within this volume. The Design in the Wax recovers the specifically medieval interpretation of the structure which underlies each part of the poem and the poem as a whole, and shows readers how to discover the single consistent principle which organizes each part and the overall narrative.

The incidents of the poem would remain hopelessly ambiguous were it not for the philosophical and theological distinctions embodied in the structure of the narrative, in whose light it is possible to reduce the ambiguity of concrete incidents to their intended allegorical content. Through medieval interpretations of Dante’s sources, Marc Cogan discovers a single consistent moral and theological principle organizing each of the sections of the poem and its overall narrative. He argues that, using one common principle, Dante brings the separate allegories of the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso together into one great allegory, making the transformation of the principle into an ordered set of variations on the theme of love and its representation in human beings as the image of God. This allegory, he points out, provides a meditation on the nature of God and the capacities of human beings.

The Design in the Wax is a thought-provoking tool for all students of the Divine Comedy interested in studying Dante’s calculated use of poetry to overcome the limits of human understanding.

Marc Cogan is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at Wayne State University in Detroit. He is the author of _The Human Thing: The Speeches and Principles of Thucydides’ History_.

Reviews

“This is far more than an essay on Dante as Aristotelian; the subtlety and refinement of Cogan’s explication of the distinctions between Aristotle and medieval Aristotelianism, and between theological appropriations of Aristotle and Dante’s highly specific strategies of use of Aristotle to both organise and liberate his poetic program, guarantees a reorientation of the long scholarly debate on Dante’s philosophical positions and allegiances.”—Nancy S. Struever, Professor, Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University