There is a poem by Pushkin called The Hapless Knight. It is about a knight who finds his nobility against the image of the immaculate woman, the perfect woman. She is worthy enough that the Knight will save the world just for her. This story is not new, nor does it belong just to the Russian Canon of literature. It can also be read in Dante’s The Divine Comedy where Dante, follows Beatrice, the perfect woman and a symbol of faith through the sordid circles of hell finally to heaven, as only she can guide him. Parallels to the worship of the Virgin Mary and to the innocent maiden in chivalric myths are not coincidental.

Somehow the spirit of the perfect woman is crucial for mankind to ennoble itself and pursue noble spiritual ends. Mircea Eliade notes in his book The Sacred and the Profane that the purpose of “the sacred” in the life of man is to provide an orienting anchor from which he can order the hierarchy of his world. Without such a hierarchy, the chaos of infinite relativism would drive a man mad. What would be worth fighting for? What would be the purpose of his power and ambition?

Yet leftists and traditionalists alike have deconstructed the woman to her component parts and in the process missed her soul. For leftists, the woman is a concentration of estrogen in the bloodstream, a set of breasts made of silicon or otherwise, a makeup regime and a pronoun. For traditionalists, the woman is a biological window, a number of eggs in her ovaries, an artificial womb, mammary glands to feed a child, a maid to clean the home and make food. Both movements profane the essence of a woman that has the power to inspire: her humanity.

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