How can a person have a spiritual life if they don’t know who Jesus is anymore? Discussions on spiritual intelligence rarely address intellectual disability.
Petre Maican suggests revisiting the early Christian concept of nous as spiritual intelligence, linking humans to God regardless of physical condition, in this journal article for CPOSAT, Spiritual Intelligence and Dementia: A Theological Reevaluation of the Nous.
Questions such as what spiritual intelligence could mean for someone whose IQ has been medically assessed at 20 or what happens with the spiritual intelligence of persons who develop Alzheimer’s are rarely answered. When this happens, we are presented mostly with an Aristotelian Thomistic notion of the soul (including intelligence) being the pattern of the body held in the memory of God. This approach, however, does not clarify how could it be possible for someone’s soul to live in the memory of God without preexisting in God’s mind before the existence of the world.
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