What Does Iconoclast Mean?

Sheep	Iconoclast
	Photos by Lisa Jane Persky

I'm glad you asked that. This is our chance to upstage the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here's their definition:
Iconoclast: 1. A breaker or destroyer of images; spec. (Eccl. Hist.) one who took part in or supported the movement in the 8th or 9th centuries, to put down the use of images or pictures in religious worship in the Christian churches of the East; hence, applied analogously to those Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries who practised or countenanced a similar destruction of images in the churches.

And that's it, if you're to believe the 1986 printing of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language adds a second connotation:

2. a person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc. as being based on error or superstition. --Syn. nonconformist, rebel, dissenter, radical.

These dictionaries are having trouble keeping up with our living, breathing language. The problem with these definitions is that they dwell too much on the past and the negative connotations of the word. The way that we use the word iconoclast now more often has to do with the spirit of intellectual or artistic inquiry. Anyone or anything that challenges the status quo or the entrenched ideology in favor of the new or as yet unknown ideal could be labeled an iconoclast. It is a name most often applied to artists and writers, poets, architects and other such entrepreneurs.

As Stephen Dedaelus says in The Portrait of an Artist...

"I will forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of our race.."

Now there's an iconoclast.

Embrace the spirit of intellectual curiosity!!
Let out your inner iconoclast!