Non serviam

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.

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."

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.