I’m at the de Nicola Center’s Fall Conference at the University of Notre Dame, which has just begun, and our theme is “But Where Can She Be Found? Wisdom from Age to Age.” So what marks wisdom in scholarship? What distinguishes the scholar who is wise from the one who is not? Having studied the work of Edith Stein for several years, I have come to see her as my paragon of wisdom. My talk will focus on how I apply philosophy to finding the place of modern science in the philosophy of nature. But I want to say something about two things that I cannot cover in my talk. This is how her philosophy was received, and how to make sense of the development of her philosophy.

Stein’s philosophical work developed from 1916, when she completed her doctoral thesis, to 1937, when her last work, Finite and Eternal Being, was ready for printing. But these 21 years spanned not only one of the most turbulent periods in German history but also a dramatic personal development for Stein. The genuine drama of her life cannot possibly be overstated, and anybody who does not prioritize the dramatic dimension in the development of her work never engages with it.

The problem is that Finite and Eternal Being, which is really her masterpiece, was received only very slowly. She finished her manuscript in 1937, but then it had already become impossible to publish it. It was published posthumously in 1950,  but without being faithful to her plan for the book. The book reviews from the time were polite, but not enthusiastic. World War II had fundamentally changed the world, and at first sight, her book belonged to a world that no longer existed. Only in 2006 was a critical edition published that was fully faithful to her work, but then it was not kept in print. You had to try to get it from antiquarian booksellers.

An English translation had been prepared in the 1960s, but it was not published until 2002, and it was based on the highly imperfect version published in 1950. The English translation of the German critical edition was not published until 2023.

This makes it very common for readers of Stein to be unfamiliar with the last and most substantial step of her philosophical journey. Without it, they might not consider it a journey at all. They see her as a follower of Edmund Husserl’s philosophy who later turned, for strictly religious reasons, to Thomism. But this fails to see how her life as a philosopher constituted a dramatic journey of mind and soul. When we appreciate her work as a philosophical drama, one that was brutally terminated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, then we can also appreciate what this means for the philosopher as a human being and philosophy as a vocation.

Modernity must be both defended, for its accomplishments, and criticized, for its lack of faith. Even though religious faith is a gift, the faith in the human person and its dignity, irrespective of any of the categories that divide us, can be affirmed by all. So that all can see it, some must see and explain how it arose out of the Christian view of the modern person and leads to religious faith. Edith Stein was one such person.