Hosius of Cordoba
Our Father among the Saints Hosius the Confessor, Bishop of Cordoba
Bishop · Confessor · b. c. 256 — d. 359, at Cordoba in Spain
Commemorated 27 August — Repose at Cordoba after sixty years in the episcopate
Hosius, bishop of Cordoba in Roman Spain for something over sixty years, is the western confessor whose hand lies on almost every decisive act of the Church in the age of Constantine. He had already confessed Christ under the persecution before he became the emperor's ecclesiastical counsellor; he carried Constantine's letters into the Arian quarrel at Alexandria, presided at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 and signed its acts first; he presided again at Serdica in 343; and he stood for the homoousion and for Athanasius of Alexandria against the emperor Constantius, who exiled him to Sirmium as a centenarian and there wrung from him a signature he immediately repented. He is remembered in the East as Hosius the Confessor, and reposed at Cordoba in 359.
Origins and the confession
Hosius was born about 256, probably at Cordoba, then the capital of the province of Baetica in southern Spain. Nothing certain is known of his family. He became bishop of Cordoba about the year 295, while he was still under forty, and held the see until his death — a tenure of more than sixty years, spanning the last and worst of the persecutions, the peace of the Church, the whole Constantinian settlement, and the Arian crisis that followed it.
The persecution came first. Hosius confessed the faith under the Diocletianic persecution, and it is on that confession, not on his later eminence, that his title in the Eastern calendars rests: he is Hosius the Confessor because he stood his ground when standing cost something, and long before there was any advantage in it. The sources give no detail of what he suffered, only that he was a confessor — the word being reserved for those who endured for Christ without dying.
About 300–306 he sat in the Spanish council at Elvira (Illiberis, near modern Granada), the earliest western council whose canons survive, where his name stands second in the subscription list. The Elvira canons are a severe, practical, local code — on idolatry, marriage, the discipline of the clergy — and they show the kind of churchman he already was: exact, unsentimental, concerned with what a bishop can actually enforce.
Counsellor of Constantine
After the peace of the Church, Hosius came into the household of Constantine the Great, and was for years the emperor's closest Christian adviser in ecclesiastical affairs. The weight of this is easy to underestimate. Constantine had no traditional apparatus for dealing with the Church, and the shape that church-state relations took in the fourth century — imperial convocation of councils, imperial letters to bishops, imperial enforcement of conciliar decisions — was worked out in practice, and a Spanish bishop was one of the two or three men in the room while it was being worked out.
When the quarrel between Alexander of Alexandria and the presbyter Arius broke out, Constantine sent Hosius to Alexandria (about 324) with a letter urging peace, and Hosius took part in the local council held there. He came back convinced that the matter could not be composed locally, and it was on his advice, the tradition says, that Constantine summoned a general council.
Nicaea and the homoousion
At Nicaea in 325 Hosius presided, and his name stands first among the subscriptions to the creed and canons, followed by the two Roman presbyters Vitus and Vincentius who represented Bishop Sylvester of Rome. He is remembered above all for the insistence that the Son is ὁμοούσιος τῷ Πατρί — consubstantial, of one essence with the Father — the single word that made the creed of Nicaea unambiguous and unacceptable to the Arians, and which the rest of the century would be spent defending. Later Arian polemicists blamed Hosius by name for the term, which is itself the strongest evidence that he was central to getting it in; Athanasius, who was present as a young deacon, always speaks of him with reverence.
Eighteen years later Hosius presided at the Council of Serdica (343), summoned to heal the growing division between the eastern and western episcopates over Athanasius. The eastern delegation withdrew and held its own assembly, so Serdica failed as a council of union; but the canons passed by the western bishops under Hosius' presidency — those permitting a condemned bishop to seek a review, with Rome as a court of appeal — became one of the foundation texts in the long argument about the prerogatives of the Roman see. The canons are transmitted in the form "Hosius the bishop said…".
Resistance to Constantius, exile, and Sirmium
After Constantine's death his son Constantius II ruled the East, and inclined increasingly to the Arianising party. The imperial policy was to secure a universal condemnation of Athanasius; and the aged bishop of Cordoba, whose signature would have been worth more than any other in the West, refused it.
Hosius' answer to the emperor is preserved by Athanasius in the History of the Arians, and it is one of the founding statements of the Church's independence of the state: he charged Constantius not to intrude himself into ecclesiastical affairs, nor to give commands in matters where he ought rather to be instructed — God had put the empire into the emperor's hands and the Church into the bishops'; and as he who steals the empire resists God, so let the emperor fear to draw to himself what belongs to the Church.
For this he was summoned to Sirmium (in Pannonia, on the Danube) and held there in exile from about 355, an old man near a hundred. In 357 the Second Creed of Sirmium — the formula which forbade the use of ousia language altogether, and which Hilary of Poitiers called the blasphemia Sirmiensis — was put before him under duress, and the sources say that he signed it, worn down by imprisonment and, some accounts add, by beatings. What he did not do was condemn Athanasius. He was released, returned across the Pyrenees to his own city, and died at Cordoba in 359, having repented bitterly of the subscription and, by one tradition, anathematised the Arian heresy on his deathbed.
Veneration
The East kept his memory as a confessor, and he stands in the synaxaria on August 27 — placed there, one may guess, by the same eastern churches that had heard his letter to Constantius read out and passed round in the Athanasian dossier. The Greek and Slavic calendars call him simply Hosios or Osii, bishop of Cordoba, which in Slavic transmission is sometimes garbled into forms like Korduvia or Korudvisk. In the West he was long an awkward figure precisely because of Sirmium, and his cult never took firm hold in Spain; the East, which had watched him hold the line for thirty years before he broke under torture at a hundred, judged him more generously.
Feast and commemoration
August 27 (church date; New Calendar civil August 27, Old Calendar civil September 9), kept together with Poemen the Great, whose commemoration dominates the day, and with Liberius of Rome — the two fourth-century western hierarchs who suffered for Athanasius standing side by side in the synaxarion, which is almost certainly why they share a day. He has no proper office; the common of a confessor-hierarch is used.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a confessor-hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who ever dealest with us according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of Thy hierarch Hosius the Confessor, who spake the truth to kings and would not be silent, guide our life in peace.
Iconography
Hosius is painted as a very old hierarch of the Latin West: white-haired and white-bearded, in phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel book — the standard bishop-confessor type. Where he appears in scenes rather than singly it is always at Nicaea: in the great council compositions of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine tradition, the emperor is enthroned in the centre with the fathers ranked on either side, and the bishop who holds or unrolls the scroll of the creed beside him may be identified as Hosius by inscription. He is otherwise a rare subject; his cult produced no distinctive attribute, and Spanish devotional images of him are modern.
No pre-1900 image identifiable as this saint has been located for this collection. The one candidate found on Wikimedia Commons under his name is a modern painted icon inscribed "SAN OSIO DE CÓRDOBA" in Spanish, uploaded from a personal website with a public-domain tag that cannot be right: the underlying panel is a twentieth- or twenty-first-century iconographer's work, and an uploader's licence claim over a photograph does not touch the painter's rights. It was rejected on that ground.
Disputed questions
- Did he preside at Nicaea? He signed first, which in a fourth-century council normally indicates presidency, and the western tradition is unanimous that he presided. But the eastern sources give the honour variously to Eustathius of Antioch or to Alexander of Alexandria, and some modern historians argue for a shared or rotating presidency, or for Constantine himself as convener presiding in honour while a bishop presided in fact. The Antiochian tradition's claim for Eustathius — who as bishop of the senior apostolic see present at the council delivered the address of welcome to the emperor — is recorded here without prejudice; the two claims are not strictly exclusive.
- Did he coin the homoousion? Ancient Arian writers say so; that is not proof, since it suited them to father the offending word on a westerner. The term had a prior history in third-century theological controversy. What can be said is that Hosius was the most determined advocate of it at Nicaea and afterwards.
- The Sirmian subscription. That Hosius signed the second Sirmian formula in 357 is attested by Hilary of Poitiers and by Athanasius, who is at pains to explain the circumstances — extreme age, imprisonment, violence — and to distinguish the signature from apostasy, since Hosius never subscribed the condemnation of Athanasius himself. A minority of later apologists have denied the subscription altogether. The Church, in commemorating him as a confessor and not disowning him, has in effect endorsed Athanasius' reading: the fall of a hundred-year-old man under torture does not cancel sixty years of standing.
- Not to be confused with the Greek adjective hosios ("venerable, holy"), which precedes the names of monastic saints in Greek calendars and which has occasionally caused the entry "Ὅσιος Κορδούβης" to be mistaken for a title rather than a name.