Light of the minds that know him

Light of the minds that know him. Timothy Dudley-Smith* (1926-2024). The original Latin of the prayer beginning ‘O thou who art the light of the minds that know thee’ is found in the Meditations of Augustine of Hippo* (354-430). Its English form was popularised largely by the early 20th-century collections edited by Eric Milner-White (1884-1963), Dean of York. This hymn, written at Ruan Minor, Cornwall, in August 1976, is an amplified metrical paraphrase of that prayer, with four stanzas structured around its original phrases. Dudley-Smith heads his text ‘Christ in experience’, and his full notes in A House of Praise (2003), repeated from his 1984 collection Lift Every Heart (p. 231),...