The Spiritual Intelligence

             In 1983 Howard Gardner proposed his theory of multiple intelligences.  It was ground-breaking psychological research.  His seven intelligences--now eight, I believe--certainly did much to open the way to considering intelligence as composing a much wider array of mental abilities than just verbal and mathematical ability.  Pedagogically, multiple intelligences implied that the teacher must be aware that students have different learning styles, and instructional methodologies must reflect the different ways that human beings learn.  This means there are as many ways to build human knowledge as there are learning styles, each builds something unique but each is also connected to other ways.  Teachers should strive to identify and match the individual interests and personal aptitudes of each student and allow the student to build knowledge in his or her own best way, and to connect with others doing the same thing. But I think that matching is not like putting a round peg in a round hole.  I see it as more like putting the right key in the door so it may open: or better, it is what physicists call a “resonant fit”: the finding of harmony by tuning the vibrations of the subject to the vibrations of the thought of the student.  This experience of attunement is one of the most important experiences of Joyful Education.       

            But though Gardner’s taxonomy was brilliant and comprehensive, I believe there is one “intelligence” missing.  I call it the spiritual intelligence for it is capable of recognizing the sacred and holy in its appearances.          

            The spiritual intelligence, as I see it, is different from Gardner’s Intrapersonal intelligence, which has to do with introspection, deciphering one’s feelings and motivations and obtaining a deep understanding of the self; what are one’s strengths/ weaknesses, what makes you unique.  Neither is it identical to Gardner’s existential intelligence, which is the ability to contemplate phenomena or questions beyond sensory data, such as the infinite and infinitesimal.           

            The Spiritual Intelligence is an intelligence composed of what Rudolph Otto in his brilliant book, The Idea of the Holy, names a "numinous consciousness."  It operates through a religious faculty resident in the spirit, with an organ of intelligence, the heart, and which uses specific spiritual powers—faith, vision, creativity, reflection—to bring the invisible into the visible.  This intelligence is not taught, but evoked in encounters with the sacred.  I have explored all this in my upcoming book, Renewing the Sacred. 

            I realize the imprecision of these terms at this point.  What do they refer to?  These terms may be only different names for the same thing or, what is the same thing, metaphors for each other.   

            But the imprecision stems, too, from the belief that we are in a different realm here, for the spiritual intelligence is not first a cognitive and rational intelligence.  Rather the spiritual intelligence is a different order of intelligence than rational intelligence because, as Otto states the “numinous informs the rational from above.”  It starts to life in the heart’s feeling for the transcendent, in the yearning to identifying oneself with the sacred and divine.  It does not originate in the desire to know, but in the desire to be known.  It is not irrational, but other and higher rational.

            Because it is not a cognitive intelligence of the mind, the spiritual intelligence is hard to find and grasp intellectually.  I mean that the experience of the transcendent, the sacred, cannot be taught, because conceptually the sacred is a negation. The best that rational statements can do in these matters is to say what the sacred in its essence is not.  It is “not rational.”  It is “illogical.”  It is “not intellectually comprehensible.”  But these are negative attributes of it.  Sacred knowledge transcends the grasp of conceptual thought, for we can conceptually grasp only that which is human or natural.  It is conceptually presented as a mental space where the sacred enters human intelligence.  Though the rational and the moral are essential parts of the sacred they are not the whole of it.  There is an unfathomable mystery about the sacred, which is evoked within human intelligence and experience and transforms them.  Thus so powerful are these experiences that Maslow wrote: “A single glimpse of heaven is enough to confirm its existence even if it is never experienced again.”  David Hawkins, in his book, Power vs. Force, says of higher states of consciousness that “these higher states are so powerful that once they have been experienced, they are never forgotten, and therefore, are sought ever after.”  

            I would love to hear any reactions to these thoughts, especially any encounters of the sacred which you may have experienced.