The Via Christa Idealist 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: a collection of books and periodicals held in a library.” Knowledge is defined as “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, but your soul is your God-given immortal software, which includes the ability to systematize and use whatever you feed it in the way of information. So 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.


“Your brain is the mental hardware you built with the body you wear, but your soul is your God-given immortal software. …Thus, you are adequately equipped to walk the Via Christa.”—Linda Mihalic


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.


The Ideal Library for Ascension


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 Pearls
A 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 Isaiah
Theologia Germanica, Susanna Winkworth, trans.


Aristotle

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 Karma


Charles Bigg

The Christian Platonists of Alexandria
Neoplatonism


Brand Blanshard

The Heritage of Idealism


Bernard Bosanquet

The Kingdom of God on Earth
Psychology 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 Light
Being 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 Reality
Collected 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 Philosophy
Fragments of Parmenides
Platonism
Plato’s Phaedo
The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul


Joseph Butler

The Works of Joseph Butler, Volume I
The Works of Joseph Butler, Volume II


Stewart Candlish and Pierfrancesco Basile

“Francis Herbert Bradley”


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 Philosophy


Ralph Cudworth

Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality


Russell Dancy

“Speusippus, a Scholarch of the Old Academy”
“Xenocrates, a Scholarch of the Old Academy”


Diogenes 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 Brain


Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Over-Soul
Plato, the Philosopher


Lloyd Gerson

“Plotinus”


Thomas Hill Green

An Essay on Christian Dogma
Justification 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

Idealism


Manly P. Hall

The Lost Keys of Masonry


Christoph Helmig and Carlos Steel

“Proclus”


Nicholas Herman

The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence


Numenius of Apamea

Numenius of Apamea, the Father of Neoplatonism, Kenneth S. Guthrie, trans.


Carl A. Huffman

“Pythagoras”


Sarah Hutton

“The Cambridge Platonists”
“Lady Anne Conway”


Iamblichus

The Life of Pythagoras, Thomas Taylor, trans.


W. R. Inge

Christian Mysticism
Faith and its Psychology
Personal Idealism and Mysticism
The Philosophy of Plotinus


Harold H. Joachim

The Nature of Truth


Nick Kampouris

“The Platonic Academy of Athens”


George Karamanolis

“Plutarch”


Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Metaphysics
Monadology
Principles of Nature and Grace
Theodicy


Brandon C. Look

“Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz”


Thomas Maguire

An Essay on the Platonic Idea
Essays on the Platonic Ethics
Lectures on Philosophy
The Parmenides of Plato


Marinus of Samaria

Life of Proclus, Kenneth S. Guthrie, trans.


Andrew Moore

“Hedonism”


Origen

The Philocalia, George Lewis, trans.


Rudolf Otto

The Idea of the Holy


Nickolas Pappas

“Plato’s Aesthetics”


Plato

Dialogues


Plotinus

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.


Porphry

Life of Plotinus
Life 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.


Pseudo-Plutarch

On Fate (De Fato), William W. Goodwin, ed.


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 Lucilius


Edouard Schuré

Pythagoras and the Delphic Mysteries


A. E. Taylor

Aristotle
Elements 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, I
Plato: The Man and His Work, II
The Problem of Conduct, Phenomenology of Ethics
“Self-Realization — A Criticism”
Socrates


Katja Vogt

“Seneca”


William Whewell

The Elements of Morality, I
The 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 Hellenism


Eduard G. Zeller

Plato and the Older Academy, I
Plato and the Older Academy, II
Plato and the Older Academy, III


Other Resources

Appendices

Detailed explanations of frequently mentioned topics on The Via Christa


Bibliography

Books and authors referred to on The Via Christa


Poems to Inspire the Soul

The poems, plays, essays, 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

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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. Accessed November 18, 2021.

Merriam-Webster, “Knowledge.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Accessed May 27, 2022.

Merriam-Webster, “Library.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Accessed November 18, 2021.