Iconoclast

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /aɪˈkɒn.əˌklæst/

Definitions

  1. A person who attacks, destroys, or opposes established institutions, traditions, beliefs, or revered figures, often challenging what is widely accepted or considered sacred
  2. A person who deliberately challenges, dismantles, or rejects widely held beliefs, cherished traditions, or revered institutions through critical opposition
  3. Someone who breaks with convention by attacking sacred ideas, established customs, or respected authority in pursuit of change or truth

Etymology: Around 730, the Byzantine emperor Leo III turned against the painted images of Christ and the saints that filled his empire's churches. His son Constantine V went further, and a church council in 754 condemned such images as idolatry. Icons were whitewashed, smashed and burned, and their defenders were persecuted. The men who did the destroying were called "eikonoklastes," Greek for "image breaker," from "eikon," a likeness or image, and "klastes," a breaker, from the verb "klan," to break. The struggle lasted more than a century. A council at Nicaea restored the images in 787, a new emperor banned them again in 815, and the empress Theodora brought them back for good in 843. The Orthodox Church still marks that final restoration every year as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The Greek term passed into Medieval Latin as "iconoclastes" and into French as "iconoclaste," and English borrowed it in the 1590s, when it was anything but a historical curiosity. Within living memory, English reformers had stripped churches of statues and stained glass, and in 1566 Protestant crowds in the Low Countries had swept through hundreds of churches breaking images. An iconoclast was still, quite literally, someone with a hammer. In 1649, just after Charles I was beheaded, a book called "Eikon Basilike," "the royal image," presented him as a saintly martyr and became a sensation. John Milton, writing for the new republic, answered it with a book he titled with the old Greek word, "Eikonoklastes." The image he set out to break was made of words and reverence, not paint and wood. He had shown how the idea could be turned on something other than a picture. The English word itself followed that path by the 1840s. An iconoclast no longer needed a church or a statue, only a cherished belief to attack. The breaker of holy pictures had become the challenger of received ideas.

Synonyms: rebel, nonconformist, dissenter

Antonyms: conformist, traditionalist