Non serviam is Latin for "I will not serve". The phrase is generally attributed to Satan, who is said to have spoken these words to express rejection to serve God in the heavenly kingdom.
Today "non serviam" is also used or referred to as 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 common beliefs and organisational 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). The words became a general expression of the basic manner of rejecting God, such that it would apply to the fall of Satan. The words have thus been attributed to Satan.
In modern times "non serviam" developed also into a general phrase used by modernists to express radical, sometimes even revolutionary rejection of conformity, not necessarily limited to religious matters only and as expressed in modern literary adaptations of the motto.[1]
The expression underlies the Shermanesque statement "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected", as well as Stephen Dedalus's in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that "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."[2]
Scriptural discussion
The original Hebrew phrase is לֹא אֶעֱבֹד (Lô´ ´e`ĕvôd). 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
- ^ cf. e.g. A. Olson, "Exile and Literary Modernism Initiation", in: A. Eysteinsson et al., Modernism Vol. 2, Amsterdam/Philadelphia 2007
- ^ Joyce, James (1922). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. B. W. Huebsch. p. 291.