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.