SERAPION, Bishop of Thmuis, Saint. - In the Syriac Calendar a St. Serapion is recorded on 19 March; from there he passed into the Hieronymian Martyrology on the 21st of the same month; Eusebius mentions him (Hist. eccl., VI, 41, 8). Florus of Lyon in the 9th century, followed later by Ado, identified him with the Serapion of Thmuis. The Roman Martyrology depends on the aforementioned interpolators.
Serapion, at first a catechist at Alexandria, probably at the Didascaleion, withdrew to the desert of Amun, became abbot of a colony of monks and formed a close friendship with St. Anthony Abbot and with St. Athanasius. If the letter of Athanasius in which a Serapion is mentioned refers to our Serapion (PG 26, 1412 ff.), one must suppose that Serapion was already bishop of Thmuis in Lower Egypt before 339. He was a learned man and, in all likelihood, took part in the Council of Sardica (343) as a supporter of his friend Athanasius and of the Council of Nicaea against the Arians; for the same reason he was sent to the imperial court of Constantius II (ca. 356); it appears that he died after 362. The title of "confessor" given him by St. Jerome (PL 23, 699) seems to have been earned by the exile inflicted on him by the Arian Ptolemy after the Council of Sardica.
Very little remains of Serapion's theological output. A treatise against the Manichees is known under his name (G. Bardy, La question des langues dans l'Eglise ancienne, Paris 1948, p. 42), which, however, like others of the time, was nothing but a collection of generic notices, external to the sect (cf. H.-Ch. Puech, Le Manichéisme, son fondateur, sa doctrine, Paris 1949, pp. 15-26); yet the arguments with which he combats the dualistic principle and the origin of evil are good. Serapion's Trinitarian doctrine is of the simplest. The consubstantiality between the Father and the Son is designated by the imprecise term "homoios" instead of "homoousios"; his Christological terminology too is no more precise. This does not prejudice his orthodoxy, and represents, rather, the manner of expression of a bishop dominated more by pastoral concerns than by polemical ones. In fact, if he was sent to the Council of Sardica and if St. Athanasius believed he could address to him writings on the Holy Spirit (PG 26, 529-676) and if he was, at first, a catechist at Alexandria, one would have to conclude that he was capable of treating theological problems with greater regard for the requirements of theological terminology. Indeed, according to others, St. Athanasius held his friend's learning in such high esteem that he submitted his manuscripts to him for examination.
A Euchologion, or collection of 30 prayers, goes under Serapion's name, but it cannot yet be critically established whether he is its author or a mere compiler: in that Euchologion there seem to be contained prayers much earlier than Serapion. The first is an anaphora of particular theological as well as liturgical interest (P. Batiffol, Etudes d'histoire et de théologie positive, 3rd series: L'Eucharistie, 7th ed., Paris 1920, pp. 311-34).
Bibliography6 works
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