The Vocabulary of a Heresy: The Case of Iconoclasm

Byzantinoslavica. 2025. Vol. 83. No. 1-2. P. 108–122.

Lukhovitskiy L.

The academic vocabulary used to describe the Iconoclastic Controversy in Byzantium includes both authentic Middle Greek lexemes and artificial terms coined in 16th–17th-century Western Europe, developed in the context of Reformation theological debates. The former category is largely represented by terms referring to the so-called Iconoclasts (εἰκονομάχοι, εἰκονοκλάσται, εἰκονοκαῦ[σ]ται), while the latter includes designations for their opponents (iconophiles, iconodules). Authentic Byzantine terms for the supporters of icon veneration (εἰκονολάτραι, εἰκονοσεβάσται) are attested only rarely and are notably underrepresented in the surviving corpus. This imbalance can be attributed to their origin as pejorative labels coined by opponents—terms that the participants of the conflict avoided using to describe themselves, preferring instead the designation “Orthodox.” This avoidance applied to both sides of the conflict, but after Orthodoxy was redefined in 843 as icon veneration, the vocabulary of the victors became normative, while the idiom of their adversaries was erased from collective memory. Although the original iconoclastic vocabulary remained unfamiliar to most historians of the controversy, some of its elements were reappropriated by hagiographers seeking to enhance the psychological realism of the antagonists through speech characterization. A hypothesis is advanced that the reconstructed idiom of the Iconoclasts, as presented by these later writers, owes more to their literary imagination than to archival research.

Keywords: ересь, греческий язык, Orthodoxy, византийская литература, iconoclasm, иконопочитание и иконоборчество, Православие, Byzantine literature, Heresies, Medieval Greek