Serapion

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A name can carry two histories at once. Before any bishop bore it, Serapion belonged to a god — to Serapis, the Greco-Egyptian deity the Ptolemies raised over Alexandria, Osiris and Apis fused into a single Hellenized lord of the dead and of grain. The fourth-century churchman of Thmuis inherited the sound and not the cult: a theophoric name, common across Roman Egypt, worn by a man who spent his working life arguing that there is one ungenerated God and no second power beside him. The distance between the god and the bishop measures a larger passage — from the old Egypt of the temples to the Egypt of councils, monks, and prayer-books, where the same delta produced both.

Bust of Serapis, the Greco-Egyptian deity whose name the bishop bore; Roman marble after a Greek original, Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican — photograph by Jastrow, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Serapion of Thmuis was a fourth-century Egyptian bishop, ascetic, and controversialist, remembered as a close ally of Athanasius of Alexandria and as the name fixed to an early collection of liturgical prayers. His see was Thmuis (Greek Thmouis), a town in the eastern Nile Delta, between the Mendesian and Tanitic branches of the river and not far from the older cult-center of Mendes. It was a small bishopric in a densely Christianized countryside, the kind of provincial see whose holder sat beneath the great metropolitan of Alexandria and rose or fell with him. The bare facts of Serapion’s life come down through the letters and writings of more famous contemporaries, and the biography that can be reconstructed is correspondingly thin and partly contested. He is active across roughly 339 to 360; he survives chiefly because greater men addressed him, cited him, and needed his help, so that almost everything firmly known about him is a reflection cast by the careers of others.

The desert prestige carried into office

He belonged to the generation in which Egyptian monasticism and the institutional church were not yet separate worlds. The ascetic life of the desert and the administrative life of a delta bishopric ran through the same men. The tradition links Serapion to Antony the Great, the founding hermit, who is said to have left him one of his two sheepskin garments at his death — the other going, in the same account, to Athanasius. Whether the bequest is historical or a piece of hagiography that gathered around a respected name, it places Serapion among those who carried the prestige of the desert into a bishop’s office. Later Coptic memory enlarged the figure further, making him head of a great monastic community; that swelling is the work of a tradition honoring its own, and the modest, well-attested core — a learned monk who became a bishop — is the firmer ground. Jerome, cataloguing the Christian authors he thought worth knowing, gave him the byname Scholasticus, the Scholar, for the polish of his learning.

That learning had a public use. Serapion stood with Athanasius through the long doctrinal wars of the century, when the see of Alexandria changed hands by force and the bishops of Egypt were repeatedly exiled, restored, and exiled again. In 347 he appeared at the Council of Sardica, the Western attempt to vindicate Athanasius against his accusers. Around 355 or 356, with Athanasius once more under attack from the imperial court, Serapion was sent at the head of an embassy of Egyptian bishops to the emperor Constantius II, to plead the case and answer the charges the Arian party had laid. For his loyalty he paid the standard price of the age: George, the anti-Nicene claimant installed over Alexandria, deprived him of his see, and he went into exile. The title Confessor — one who suffered for the faith short of death — attached to him in consequence, preserved in Jerome and in the later Roman Martyrology, which keeps his memory on 21 March.

Athanasius of Alexandria, the metropolitan whose cause Serapion championed; sixteenth-century Byzantine icon, Metropolitan Museum of Art — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Letters to Serapion and the divinity of the Spirit

The doctrinal fight that made his name was not, in the first instance, his own writing but his question. While Athanasius was hiding among the monks of the Egyptian desert in the late 350s, a letter reached him from Thmuis. Serapion reported a group in his region — the Tropici, so called from the figurative (tropikos) readings of Scripture by which they argued — who were willing to confess the full divinity of the Son while denying it to the Holy Spirit, holding the Spirit instead to be a creature, the highest of the angels or a thing made. The Nicene settlement of 325 had fixed the Son’s relation to the Father; it had said almost nothing explicit about the Spirit. Serapion’s report exposed the gap, and Athanasius answered it.

The reply is the four Letters to Serapion concerning the Holy Spirit, written about 359 — among the earliest Christian texts devoted to the question and a founding document of Trinitarian theology. The first and longest letter carries the weight of the case; the later three condense and restate it, the fourth turning also to a related dispute over a passage in Matthew. The argument Athanasius pressed is one of relation: the Spirit belongs to the Son as the Son belongs to the Father, proper to the Godhead and not foreign to it, so that to make the Spirit a creature is to break the very unity the Tropici thought they were defending in the Son. If the Spirit were merely the highest of created things, then the Trinity into which the church baptizes would be a Father and a Son joined to a creature — two and a half persons, not three — and the consubstantiality won for the Son at Nicaea would unravel from below. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are confessed as one, of one substance; the Spirit sanctifies and makes the baptized partakers of God, and what sanctifies cannot itself be among the things that need sanctifying. Athanasius builds the whole argument from Scripture, weighing the figurative readings by which the Tropici had argued their case and answering them text by text — the method that gave the group its name. The full doctrinal weight of this belongs to the development of pneumatology and the road to the Council of Constantinople in 381; here the point is narrower and more particular. The letters survive because Serapion was their occasion. His name is fixed to the foundation of Spirit-theology not as its author but as the bishop whose pastoral problem forced the argument into the open — the rare case of a minor figure preserved by the exact shape of his question. The standard English version is C. R. B. Shapland’s of 1951.

Against the Manichaeans: drawing the line at dualism

Under his own name two kinds of writing are transmitted. The first is a polemical treatise Against the Manichaeans, a refutation of the religion of Mani — the third-century Mesopotamian apostle whose missionaries had reached Egypt within his lifetime and whose Church of Light was spreading through the Roman Mediterranean. Serapion does not attempt the whole system. He fixes on the architectural claim, the one that made the religion what it was: that good and evil are two ungenerated, eternal, ontologically distinct powers — Light and Darkness — neither derived from the other, coexisting from before all time. In the Manichaean account this dualism was not a moral metaphor or a story of a fall but a strict cosmology: darkness a primordial substance with its own kingdom and archons, not a privation or a shadow of the good.

The Manichaean cosmos that Serapion’s treatise set out to refute: a Yuan-dynasty silk painting diagramming the realms of light and darkness — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Against it Serapion presses the orthodox counter-claim of a single uncreated source, arguing in the manner of his age through a chain of posed objections and answers. His method runs closer to that of Titus of Bostra, who mounted a general assault on the dualist principle itself, than to the more biographical and exegetical attacks of Augustine in the Latin West or the philosophical refutation of Alexander of Lycopolis. The treatise is one strand in a wide patristic effort to mark off an emerging orthodoxy from the dualist and gnostic currents — the world of gnosis and its many cosmologies — that shared the same eastern Mediterranean air. The modern critical edition is R. P. Casey’s of 1931. What the disagreement turned on — whether matter and evil are an independent first principle or a defect within a single created order — is the long quarrel of dualism; Serapion’s contribution is to have stated the Egyptian church’s side of it early, and in Greek.

The Sacramentary: a church at prayer, before the great rites hardened

The other work transmitted under his name, and the more famous, is the Sacramentary or Euchologion of Serapion: a set of roughly thirty prayers recovered from a single eleventh-century manuscript, a codex of Egyptian liturgical material in the Great Lavra on Mount Athos. A. Dmitrijewskij first printed it in 1894 to little notice; G. Wobbermin published it independently in 1899, and F. E. Brightman’s edition and study in the Journal of Theological Studies the same year and the next brought it into general scholarly view. F. X. Funk re-edited it in 1905.

The Great Lavra on Mount Athos, whose library held the single eleventh-century manuscript that preserved the Sacramentary of Serapion — photograph via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The collection is arranged as a bishop’s book of prayers — texts a bishop would need rather than a complete service, and ordered roughly by occasion. It contains a eucharistic anaphora and the prayers that frame it; a sequence for baptism, including the blessing of the water and of the oils used in initiation, with prayers said before and after the immersion; prayers for the laying-on of hands in the ordination of deacons, presbyters, and bishops; a blessing of oils and of the sick; and prayers over the offerers and over the dead. The grouping is itself a document: it shows which acts a delta bishop of the fourth century counted as the recurring work of his office, and in what sequence the local church understood them to belong together. Several of its features have made it one of the most studied texts of early Christian worship. Its anaphora carries the earliest secure witness to the Sanctus — the angelic “Holy, holy, holy” — within a eucharistic prayer. Where the developed liturgies would call down the Holy Spirit upon the gifts, Serapion’s prayer asks instead for the descent of the Logos, the Word: an epiclesis of the Word rather than the Spirit, an older and rarer shape. And between the words spoken over the bread and those spoken over the cup it sets a prayer for the unity of the Church drawn from the Didache, the first-century manual of Christian practice — a join visible like a seam in old cloth.

Whether Serapion composed all of these prayers is a question scholarship has never settled. Some have argued that the collection is a later compilation working over an authentic core, that particular prayers were interpolated or revised, that the attribution is a convenient label for an Egyptian liturgical deposit only partly his. The standard modern study, Maxwell E. Johnson’s of 1995, weighs the layers prayer by prayer and finds an archaic stratum genuinely close to Serapion’s century alongside signs of later hands. What is not in doubt is the value of the deposit. The sacraments it preserves — eucharist, baptism, ordination, the blessing of oils — are caught at a moment before the great liturgies of the East were standardized, when a delta bishop’s prayers could still take a shape no later book would quite repeat. Read for its architecture rather than its use, the Euchologion is a rare cross-section of how a fourth-century Egyptian church addressed God: what it asked for, in what order, and in whose name.

A minor name at a seam

The figure who emerges sits at a particular seam of late antiquity. The Mediterranean that produced the Hermetic writings and the Gnostic and Manichaean schools was the same world in which Serapion drew the boundaries of an emerging orthodoxy — naming as error the dualism those currents shared, and helping to fix in prayer and argument what the church would carry forward. He is a minor name beside Athanasius and Antony, and that is part of what makes him useful: through him the ordinary machinery of fourth-century Egyptian Christianity, its liturgy and its quarrels, can be seen at close range.

Texts and scholarship

The primary materials cluster in three places. The Letters to Serapion concerning the Holy Spirit are Athanasius’s, addressed to him; the long-standard English translation is C. R. B. Shapland, The Letters of Saint Athanasius Concerning the Holy Spirit (London and New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), which renders all four. An introductory study of the letters and their occasion is available online in the paper by L. R. Leport, An Introduction to the Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit. The treatise Against the Manichaeans has its critical edition in Robert Pierce Casey, Serapion of Thmuis: Against the Manichees (Harvard Theological Studies 15; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931). For the prayer-collection, the foundational publication and analysis is F. E. Brightman, The Sacramentary of Serapion of Thmuis, in the Journal of Theological Studies (old series, volume I, 1899–1900), pages 88–113 and 247–277, with F. X. Funk’s re-edition in Didascalia et Constitutiones Apostolorum, volume 2 (Paderborn, 1905). The modern monograph is Maxwell E. Johnson, The Prayers of Sarapion of Thmuis: A Literary, Liturgical, and Theological Analysis (Orientalia Christiana Analecta 249; Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1995), which sets the authorship question on its present footing. The compact older summary in the eleventh-edition Encyclopaedia Britannica remains a serviceable orientation, with the caution that it predates Johnson’s analysis and the fuller study of the Manichaean self-witness recovered in the twentieth century.

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