only Love but also Righteousness
and War.

Other examples of his honesty of mind are furnished in the Paradise
where he expresses through the mouths of his disembodied teachers views
opposed to those he had already advanced in his other works. Thus his
theory of the spots on the moon, his statement as to the respective rank
of the angelic orders, his assumption that Hebrew was the language of
Adam and Eve--all yield to a maturer conception in contradiction to his
original views. He is, it is true, sometimes blinded by partisanship or
lacking in the historical perspective necessary for a true judgment of
his contemporaries--but Dante is naturally so sincere a man that he is
eager to be just to every one. Perhaps there is no better instance of
the exercise of this quality than in his assigning to the heaven of
Jupiter, Constantine, to whose supposed donation of vast territories,
then regarded as genuine, Dante ascribes the corruption of the Church.

Many readers, whose acquaintance with our poet does not extend beyond
the Inferno, see in him only the incarnation of savagery and scorn. They
fail to pay tribute to the wonderful power of his friendship or to
recognize that his sufferings of adversity and injustice gave birth to
deep passion. To them he seems only to place his few friends in Heaven
and in Hell to roast all his enemies. It must be at once confessed that
there are instances in the Divina Commedia which, taken by themselves,
would lead one to so superficial an estimate of the man. In Canto VIII
of the Inferno Dante with his guide, Virgil, enters a bark on the Styx
and sails across the broad marsh. During the passage a spirit all
covered with mud addresses Dante, who recognizes him as Filippo Argenti,
a Florentine notorious for his arrogance and brutal violence. "Master,"
says Dante to Virgil, "I should be glad to see him dipped in this swill
ere we quit the lake." And he to me, 'Before the shore comes to thy view
thou shalt be satisfied.' A little while after this I saw the muddy
people make such a rending of him that even now I praise and thank God
for it. Such gloating over suffering surely seems to say to you: Here
we have a man of a cruel vindictive nature.

Again, in the ice of Caina, the region where traitors are immersed up to
their heads, Dante hits his foot violently against the face of Bocca
degli Abati who betrayed the Florentines at the crucial battle of
Montaperti. "Weeping it cried out to me: 'W