Stein called Finite and Eternal Being her ‘spiritual legacy’. The access to this legacy has been restricted by the dif-ficulty of assessing exactly what it is that Stein is doing in the work. It has been regarded as a work of Thomist philosophy, but a closer reading reveals it as quite critical of St Thomas. After the publication of the appendices of the work, it has become fairly clear that it can be conceived as a critique of the early Heidegger. Stein understood her task as being that of bringing together Aristotelian and Modern philosophy, the lat-ter represented by Phenomenology and the former by Scholas-ticism. We shall propose (the beginnings of ) an interpretation of the work that sees it as the culmination of Stein’s phenome-nological project, as well as a work standing in the tradition of the philosophia perennis.