Non serviam

This article is about the phrase. For other uses, see Non serviam (disambiguation).

Non serviam is Latin for "I will not serve".

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Today "non serviam" is also used as a motto by a number of political, cultural, and religious groups to express their wish to rebel. It may be used to express a radical view against established beliefs and organizational structures accepted as the status quo.

Use

In the Latin Vulgate, Jeremiah laments that the people of Israel speak "non serviam" to express their rejection of God (Jeremiah 2:20). This is the only appearance of the phrase in the Vulgate.

In James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 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."^[1] 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.^[2]

Non Serviam was the third single released from Frank Turner's No. 1 Album FTHC.

It is also the name of a French underground extreme music collective.^[3]