The Universality of Spirituality and Spiritual Intelligence

Spirituality, especially in the perspective of universality, is of the essence for disability theology. It provides answers to a genuine concern of many religious persons, namely, whether their loved ones with profound intellectual disabilities or dementia can (still) engage with the transcendent, for example, as to whether they can know God. In this paper, I assess whether there are reasonable grounds for the universality of spirituality. In the first section, I assess a variety of approaches that have dealt with this matter. In the second section, I discuss whether the concept of spiritual intelligence can be used to argue for the universality of spirituality. This concept draws a line between spiritual intelligence and general intelligence, usually understood rationalistically, and thus opens the way for understanding the spirituality of persons whose general intelligence is profoundly disabled. In the third section, I argue that psychological research should be complemented by theological arguments, making a case for the apophatic nature of the mental lives of persons with intellectual disabilities, as well as for a sense of spirituality that acknowledges its transcendent dimension. In the fourth section, I illustrate this with three theological approaches to the universality of spirituality and spiritual intelligence. I conclude by asserting the theological plausibility of the universality of spirituality and the universality of a specific form of spiritual intelligence.