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The Via Christa Library
By Linda Mihalic
A library is “a building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for people to read, borrow, or refer to.” Knowledge is “the sum of what is known: the body of truth, information, and principles acquired by humankind.”
Your brain is the mental hardware you built with the body you wear, your OS is the mind that was in Christ Jesus, and your soul is your immortal God-given software, which includes the ability to systematize and use whatever you feed it in the way of information. Thus, you are adequately equipped to begin walking the Via Christa. However, all the books in the world, physical or digital, will do you little good if you lack an inquiring mind capable of critically assessing the truth and validity of the knowledge it gains, while remaining open to new data.
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”–Philippians 2:5
Edna Lister was dedicated to educating the whole person—heart, mind and soul. We who travel the trail she blazed advocate being well-educated and devoted to lifelong learning, especially in the fields of science, psychology, metaphysics, philosophy, and mysticism. She was an avid reader with eclectic tastes, yet favored Idealists including Pythagoras, Plato, Plutarch, Plotinus, a few Stoics and the British Idealists. As an idealist herself, she lived her philosophy daily—no ivory tower for her! She loved mysteries, which she claimed sharpened the powers of logic and deductive thinking. Science fiction, she said, was “history, pre-written.” She read all the magazines her sons subscribed to, including Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Amazing Stories, Science Fiction, etc. She credited her continuing education to her sons, who though born twelve years apart to different fathers, were themselves close and good friends. Her older son, Russell J. Elliott, was a mining engineer, as was his stepfather, Henry T. Abstein, Sr. Their son, Henry T. Abstein, Jr., was an aerospace engineer with Hughes Aerospace Group and Boeing.
We have found several reading lists among her students’ papers—authors and books she had suggested. They reveal that she advocated a Classics education at minimum, an experience she had been deprived of as a young woman whose father did not believe women needed higher education. She was a single working mother from 1924 on, but her dream of being college-educated came true after she met Dr. Thomas Parker Boyd, who sponsored her matriculation (1925-1934) at what is now U. C. Berkley, where he taught. There she studied psychology, a field then in its infancy, and comparative religion, under Dr. Boyd’s mentorship.
Edna Lister’s Works include books, pamphlets and essays; however, the bulk of her work is found in the thousands of pages of sermon and lecture outlines she created for lecturing, teaching, preaching and public speaking.
Black PearlsA Design for Ascension
Eternal Youth
Faith in Action
Faith, the Challenger
The First Mastery
Five Important Steps in Ascension
Five Keys to the Kingdom
God as Consciousness Appears as Form
The Gold Standard
How to Stay UP!
I AM Joy!
Life in a Nutshell
Time, the Adjuster of Life
The Universal Magna Carta
Welcome, My Son
What Is Principle?
Recommended Books and Authors
Walking the Via Christa may profoundly shift your perception of what reality truly is, and expand your ability to see through the veils of illusion that too often mislead you in this world of mere appearances. The volumes included here cover various areas of study you may encounter on The Via Christa, but more importantly they dispel the surface glamour of what the world defines as “reality.” We have included the translated works of many seminal thinkers and philosophers—Idealist, Platonist, Neoplatonist, and Judeo-Christian—who have formed the foundation of Western thought.
Anonymous
The Ascension of IsaiahTheologia Germanica, Susanna Winkworth, trans.
Aristotle
Categories, E. M. Edghill., trans. Metaphysics, Hugh Tredennick, trans.Nicomachean Ethics, W. D. Ross, trans.
On the Soul (De Anima), W. D. Ross, trans.
Virtues and Vices, H. Rackham, trans.
William W. Atkinson
Reincarnation and the Law of KarmaCharles Bigg
The Christian Platonists of AlexandriaNeoplatonism
Brand Blanshard
The Heritage of IdealismBernard Bosanquet
The Kingdom of God on EarthPsychology of the Moral Self
On the Philosophical Distinction Between Knowledge and Opinion
On Hegel and German Idealism
What Religion Is
Thomas Parker Boyd
The Armor of LightBeing and Doing
Borderland Experiences
Christmas
The Christ Science
The Finger of God
The How and Why of the Emmanuel Movement
The Kabbala of the New Testament
The Law and the Testimony, Daily Meditations
The Mental Highway
A New Concept of God on Earth
The Prospectus of Life in the University of Hard Knocks
The Voice Eternal
F. H. Bradley
Appearance and RealityCollected Essays, I
Collected Essays, II
Essays on Truth and Reality
Ethical Studies: Selected Essays
The Principles of Logic, I
The Principles of Logic, II
John Burnet
Early Greek PhilosophyFragments of Parmenides
Platonism
Plato’s Phaedo
The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul
Joseph Butler
The Works of Joseph Butler, Volume IThe Works of Joseph Butler, Volume II
Stewart Candlish and Pierfrancesco Basile
“Francis Herbert Bradley”Thomas Carlyle
“Advice to Young Men”Marcus Tullius Cicero
The Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis)Clement of Alexandria
The Stromata (Miscellanies), William Wilson, trans.Lady Anne Conway
The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern PhilosophyRalph Cudworth
Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable MoralityRussell Dancy
“Speusippus, a Scholarch of the Old Academy”“Xenocrates, a Scholarch of the Old Academy”
Ernest Dimnet
The Art of ThinkingDiogenes Laertius
Life of Plato, R. D. Hicks, trans.Life of Pythagoras of Samos, R. D. Hicks, trans.
Theron Q. Dumont
The Solar Plexus or Abdominal BrainArthur S. Eddington
Science and the Unseen WorldRalph Waldo Emerson
The Over-SoulPlato, the Philosopher
Lloyd Gerson
“Plotinus”Sherry Gordon
What Can I Do for the World?Thomas Hill Green
An Essay on Christian DogmaJustification by Faith
T. H. Green’s Lay Sermons
The Conversion of Paul
Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life
Prolegomena to Ethics
The Immortality of the Soul
The Incarnation of the Word
The Word Is Nigh Thee
Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann
IdealismManly P. Hall
The Lost Keys of MasonryChristoph Helmig and Carlos Steel
“Proclus”Nicholas Herman
The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother LawrenceCarl A. Huffman
“Pythagoras”Sarah Hutton
“The Cambridge Platonists”“Lady Anne Conway”
Iamblichus
The Life of Pythagoras, Thomas Taylor, trans. Fragments of Ethical Writings of Certain Pythagoreansand a Collection of Pythagoric Sentences from Stobæus and Others, Thomas Taylor, trans. Iamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, Thomas Taylor, trans.
W. R. Inge
Christian MysticismFaith and its Psychology
Personal Idealism and Mysticism
The Philosophy of Plotinus
Harold H. Joachim
The Nature of TruthBenjamin. Jowett
Introductions to and Analyses of Plato’s DialoguesNick Kampouris
“The Platonic Academy of Athens”George Karamanolis
“Plutarch”Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
MetaphysicsMonadology
Principles of Nature and Grace
Theodicy
Abraham Lincoln
The Gettysburg AddressBrandon C. Look
“Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz”Thomas Maguire
An Essay on the Platonic IdeaEssays on the Platonic Ethics
Lectures on Philosophy
The Parmenides of Plato
Marinus of Samaria
Life of Proclus, Kenneth S. Guthrie, trans.Andrew Moore
“Hedonism”George F. Moore
MetempsychosisNumenius of Apamea
Numenius of Apamea, the Father of Neoplatonism, Kenneth S. Guthrie, trans.Origen
The Philocalia, George Lewis, trans.Rudolf Otto
The Idea of the HolyNickolas Pappas
“Plato’s Aesthetics”Plato
DialoguesPlotinus
Enneads I, Stephen MacKenna, trans.Enneads II, Stephen MacKenna, trans.
Enneads III, Stephen MacKenna, trans.
Plutarch
Moralia, Loeb Classical Library
Consolation to His Wife, P. H. De Lacy and B. Einarson, trans.
On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance, P. H. De Lacy and B. Einarson, trans.
On the ‘E’ at Delphi, F. C. Babbitt, trans.
Isis and Osiris, F. C. Babbitt, trans.
On Listening to Lectures, F. C. Babbitt, trans.
The Oracles at Delphi no Longer Given in Verse, F. C. Babbitt, trans.
On the Obsolescence of Oracles, F. C. Babbitt, trans.
Platonic Questions, I. Chauncy, trans., W. W. Goodwin, ed.
On the Procreation of the Soul in Timaeus , J. Philips, trans., W. W. Goodwin, ed.
On the Sign of Socrates, P. H. De Lacy and B. Einarson, trans.
To an Uneducated Ruler, H. N. Fowler, trans.
Porphyry
Life of PlotinusLife of Pythagoras of Samos
Proclus Diadochus
The Elements of Theology, E. R. Dodds, trans.Fragments that Remain of the Lost Writings of Proclus, Thomas Taylor, trans.
Erwin Rohde
Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality Among the Greeks, I.Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality Among the Greeks, II.
Seneca
“On the God Within Us”, Moral letters to LuciliusPaul Shorey
The Unity of Plato's ThoughtWhat Plato Said
Edouard Schuré
Pythagoras and the Delphic MysteriesA. E. Taylor
AristotleElements of Metaphysics, I
Elements of Metaphysics, II
Epicurus
The Faith of a Moralist, I
The Faith of a Moralist, II
The Laws of Plato
“The Metaphysical Problem, its Bearing Upon Ethics”
“Mind and Nature”
Philosophical Studies, Part I
Philosophical Studies, Part II
“The Place of Psychology in the Classification of the Sciences”
Plato
Platonism and Its Influence
Plato: The Man and His Work, II
The Problem of Conduct, Phenomenology of Ethics
“Self-Realization — A Criticism”
Socrates
Thomas Taylor
Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of PlatoKatja Vogt
“Seneca”William Whewell
The Elements of Morality, IThe Elements of Morality, II
Systematic Morality
Foundations of Morals
History of Moral Philosophy
Joseph Butler’s Sermons on Human Nature, Preface
Thomas Whittaker
The Neo-Platonists: A Study in the History of HellenismEduard G. Zeller
Plato and the Older Academy, IPlato and the Older Academy, II
Plato and the Older Academy, III
Other Resources
Appendices
Detailed explanations of frequently mentioned topics on The Via ChristaBibliography
Books and authors referred to on The Via ChristaGlossary
Definitions of terms used on The Via Christa site, often emphasizing our particular useage.Soul Inspiration
The essays, poetry, plays, etc. quoted on The Via Christa,which bear witness to our uniquely Western moral and ethical base
Quotes to Ponder
Certain thoughts and writings quoted on The Via Christa
.
Library, “a collection of books; a place in which literary, musical, artistic, or reference materials are kept for use but not for sale.” The equivalent word for library in most Romance languages survives only in the sense of a “bookseller’s shop” (French libraire, and Italian libraria). Old English had bochord, literally a “book hoard.”Etymology of library: Latin librarium “chest for books,” from liber (genitive libri) “book, paper, parchment.”
References
Harper, Douglas. “Etymology of library.” Online Etymology Dictionary. November 18, 2021.
Merriam-Webster, “Knowledge.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. May 27, 2022.
Merriam-Webster, “Library.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. November 18, 2021.