Henri De Lubac played a major role in nearly all of the theological debates within Roman Catholicism during the twentieth century. Educated in the renewed Thomism of Blondel, Rousselot, and Maréchal, he urged a return to the church fathers, cofounding Sources chrétiennes, an important series of patristic texts with translations. The Discovery of God contains the guiding thread of all of de Lubac's work: the idea of God and the life of the spirit.

In this important volume one finds the ultimate justification for de Lubac's positions against the atheisms of East and West. The book stands as a gloss on this dictum of Thomas Aquinas: "In every act of thought and will, God is also thought and willed implicitly." Although his book provoked much controversy at the time of its original publication, de Lubac insisted that its intention was simply to draw on the double treasure of the philosophia perennis and Christian experience in order "to lend a helping hand to a few people in their search for God."