Serapion

← Encyclopedia

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, a town in the eastern Nile Delta; the bare facts of his 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 belonged to the generation in which Egyptian monasticism and the institutional church were not yet separate worlds. The tradition links him to Antony the Great, the founding hermit of the desert, who is said to have left Serapion one of his two sheepskins at his death; whether the bequest is historical or hagiographical, it places Serapion among those who carried the prestige of the desert into a bishop’s office. He stood with Athanasius through the long doctrinal wars of the century. Athanasius addressed to him four letters defending the full divinity of the Holy Spirit against a group who granted the Son’s divinity but denied the Spirit’s — the surviving Letters to Serapion are among the founding documents of Trinitarian theology, and they survive because Serapion was their occasion.

Under his own name two kinds of writing are transmitted. One is a polemical treatise Against the Manichaeans, a refutation of the dualist religion of Mani then spreading through Egypt; in it Serapion argues, in the manner of his age, against the claim that good and evil are two ungenerated powers. The other, and the more famous, is the so-called Sacramentary or Euchologion of Serapion: a set of roughly thirty prayers — for the eucharist, baptism, ordination, and the blessing of oils — recovered from a single manuscript on Mount Athos and published in the late nineteenth century. Whether Serapion actually composed all of them is a question scholarship has never settled; what is not in doubt is that the collection preserves a window onto how a fourth- century Egyptian church prayed, before the great liturgies were standardised, and that alone has made it one of the most studied texts of early Christian worship.

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.

→ Related: Theology · Gnosis