Serapion of Thmuis
Our Father among the Saints Serapion, Bishop of Thmuis
Bishop · Confessor · b. c. 300 — d. after 362
Commemorated 21 March — Commemoration of the bishop of Thmuis, friend of Athanasius
Serapion (c. 300 – after 362) was bishop of Thmuis in the Egyptian Delta, a monk of the Nitrian desert before his consecration, the intimate friend and staunch ally of Athanasius the Great in the struggle against Arianism, and one of the recipients of the letters of Antony the Great. He is remembered above all for the Euchologion (Sacramentary) that bears his name — the earliest substantially surviving collection of Egyptian liturgical prayers — and for his treatise Against the Manichaeans. He is numbered among the confessors of the Nicene faith.
Serapion, surnamed "the Scholastic" for his learning, was formed in the ascetic life among the monks of Nitria and Scetis, where he knew Antony the Great; on Antony's death the desert father is said to have bequeathed him one of his two sheepskin cloaks (the other going to Athanasius). From the monastic life he was drawn to the episcopate of Thmuis (Greek Θμοῦις, Coptic Thmui), a city of the Nile Delta, probably in the 330s or 340s.
As bishop he became one of the most trusted lieutenants of Athanasius of Alexandria in the long conflict with the Arians. Athanasius addressed to him a set of four Letters to Serapion on the divinity of the Holy Spirit — a foundational text of Trinitarian theology, written to refute those (the "Tropici") who confessed the Son's divinity yet denied the Spirit's. Athanasius also sent him the Letter on the Death of Arius. When the emperor Constantius pressed the Arian cause, Serapion was among the bishops sent (c. 356) on an embassy to the emperor on Athanasius's behalf, and he shared in the sufferings of the orthodox party under the persecution that followed.
His own writings show a mind engaged on several fronts. The treatise Against the Manichaeans is a careful refutation of the dualist teaching then spreading in Egypt. Above all, the liturgical collection known as the Sacramentary or Euchologion of Serapion — some thirty prayers for the Eucharist, baptism, ordinations and the blessing of oils and of the faithful, recovered from an eleventh-century manuscript on Mount Athos — preserves the shape of Egyptian worship in the mid-fourth century and is a primary witness to the early anaphora, the epiclesis, and the prayers over the catechumens and the departed. Its authenticity and attribution have been debated, but it remains one of the earliest and richest sources for the history of the Church's prayer.
The date and manner of his death are not recorded; he was still living after 362, and the tradition numbers him among the confessors rather than the martyrs. Saint Jerome lists him among the illustrious writers of the Church.
Feast and commemoration
March 21 (church date; Old Calendar civil April 3). His memory falls within Great Lent, so no proper Liturgy is appointed on the weekday; where his commemoration is kept liturgically the common of a hierarch is used.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, ever dealing with us according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of Thy hierarch Serapion guide our life in peace.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Serapion is depicted as a bishop in the omophorion, blessing or holding a Gospel book, in the manner of the fourth-century Egyptian hierarchs. No pre-1900 icon of him alone has been identified for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with Serapion the Sindonite, the Egyptian ascetic who owned nothing but a linen cloth (the sindōn) and sold even himself into slavery to convert his masters — a distinct saint of the desert tradition, who shares this same day of March 21 in Greek usage and is kept on May 14 in the Slavonic books; nor with Serapion of Novgorod (†1516) or Serapion of Pechenga. The several Serapions of the Egyptian desert are easily conflated in the collections.
- The extent of Serapion's authorship of the Euchologion — whether he composed, compiled, or merely lent his name to it — is a standing question of liturgical scholarship.