Spiritual intelligence in persons with intellectual disabilities

If spiritual intelligence is mainly understood in terms of general intelligence it risks excluding those who are profoundly intellectually disabled. Conversely, if there is reason to believe that spiritual intelligence is more universal than general intelligence, this would shed light on what exactly spiritual intelligence amounts to. In this chapter, I therefore enquire into the spirituality of those persons whose general intelligence is undeveloped or profoundly disabled. First, I bring in findings from psychological research that indicate different forms of spirituality in children and persons with dementia, arguing that there exists a significant variety in the forms spiritual intelligence can take. Second, I move to a theological discussion of the topic, in which I present arguments for the limitations of psychological enquiry into the spiritual intelligence of persons with profound intellectual disabilities, and assess various theological approaches that try to overcome these limitations. Although several of these approaches fail to account successfully for the universality of spiritual intelligence, two approaches are more promising. They emphasise God’s agency in spiritual intelligence and the unknowability of God in general, which relativises the importance of cognitively grasping propositional knowledge about God and opens up the way to a universal understanding of spiritual intelligence.