OSSIUS of Córdoba. - B. ca. 257, d. ca. 358. He appears for the first time at the Council of Elvira (ca. 300), bishop of Cordova from 295; a confessor of the faith in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian in 303, he was able to display his glorious scars at Nicaea. From 313 he was a counselor of Constantine, in whose conversion he perhaps played a principal part. Subsequently his life became identified with the cause of orthodoxy against Arianism. Sent by Constantine to Alexandria (ca. 324), he convened a Council there, which rejected the doctrine of Sabellius. There too the schism of Colluthus was condemned. More decisively, O., together with Constantine, prepared the celebration of a general council at Nicaea that would definitively condemn Arius. O. directed its sessions as president, together with the Roman legates, promulgating in it the formula of the homoousion as the touchstone of-
Constans (355), who wanted to make him renounce the Nicene faith and condemn St. Athanasius. His energetic reply (356) earned him exile to Sirmium at the hands of the Emperor; and there, now a centenarian, worn out by hardships and by exile amid violence of every kind, the signature was finally wrung from him that subscribed to the second formula of Sirmium, which he himself soon afterward retracted in the hour of death, as having been imposed by violence; for thus indeed it is attested by St. Athanasius: "In his testament he protested against the violence used and hurled his anathemas against the Arian heresy, ordering that no one should follow it." The Greek Church venerates him as a saint on August 27.
His whole life was sacrificed to action. He left, however, though brief, certain writings, true literary gems. St. Isidore of Seville attributes to him a letter to his sister, De laude virginitatis, in a serene style, and a treatise De interpretatione vestium sacerdotalium quae sunt in Veteri Testamento, whose genius and shrewdness he praises; but nothing of these works has been preserved. St. Athanasius, on the other hand, has transmitted in his Historia Arianorum, 44, the letter to Constantius, an imperishable monument of the great bishop's fortitude, and at the same time a decisive canon of the jurisdiction and immunity of the Church before every act of oppression.
Bibliography11 works
Giuseppe Madoz