''Non serviam'' is

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

for "I will not serve". The phrase is traditionally attributed to Satan, who is thought to have spoken these words as a refusal to serve

God In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'', Oxford University Press, 1995. God is typically ...

in heaven. Today "non serviam" is also used or referred to as

motto A motto (derived from the Latin , 'mutter', by way of Italian , 'word' or 'sentence') is a sentence or phrase expressing a belief or purpose, or the general motivation or intention of an individual, family, social group, or organisation. Mot ...

by a number of

political Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...

, cultural, and

religious Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...

groups to express their wish to rebel; it may be used to express a radical view against established common beliefs and organisational structures accepted as the status quo.

Use

In the

Vulgate The Vulgate (; also called (Bible in common tongue), ) is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. The Vulgate is largely the work of Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels u ...

Jeremiah Jeremiah, Modern: , Tiberian: ; el, Ἰερεμίας, Ieremíās; meaning " Yah shall raise" (c. 650 – c. 570 BC), also called Jeremias or the "weeping prophet", was one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible. According to Jewi ...

laments that the people of Israel speak "''non serviam''" to express their rejection of God (). This is the only appearance of the phrase in the Vulgate. In

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

's ''

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A ''Künstlerroman'' written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional al ...

'', Stephen Dedalus says "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning." In a climactic moment of ''Ulysses'', Dedalus is confronted in a brothel by an apparition of his dead mother, urging him to repent and avoid "the fire of hell." He cries out "''Ah non, par exemple!'' The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam! (...) No! No! No! Break my spirit all of you if you can! I'll bring you all to heel!" In modern times, "''non serviam''" has developed into a general phrase used to express radical, sometimes even revolutionary rejection of conformity, not necessarily limited to religious matters and as expressed in modern literary adaptations of the motto.cf. e.g. A. Olson, "Exile and Literary Modernism Initiation", in: A. Eysteinsson et al., ''Modernism'' Vol. 2, Amsterdam/Philadelphia 2007

Scriptural discussion

The original Hebrew phrase is ''לֹא אֶעֱבֹד'' (''Lô´ ´e`ĕvôd''), where it appears in a

jeremiad A jeremiad is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminen ...

against Israel, accusing them of refusing to serve

. Some English language Bibles may translate "''non serviam''" as "I will not transgress"; this seems to be an alternative reading of certain manuscripts. This is most likely a scribal error because the difference between "serve" (''עבד'') and "transgress" (''עבר'') in late Hebrew characters is so minute that it would be easy to mistake one for the other when hand-copying a manuscript. Most modern literal translations (such as the Revised Standard Version) choose "serve" over "transgress" as the proper reading because the context calls for a statement of disobedience, not of obedience.

References

External links

A Latin Vulgate
{{DEFAULTSORT:Non Serviam Latin religious words and phrases Cultural depictions of the Devil Authority Rebellion Disobedience