What's your Spiritual IQ? Is there even such a thing as Spiritual Intelligence -- SI? If so, can we measure the soul's wisdom beyond the calculating mind? Such questions exploded at the latest meetings of the American Psychology Association (APA) and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).

University of California (Davis) psychologist Robert A. Emmons has tackled the question head-on by applying to SI the rigorous criteria developed by Harvard University's Howard Gardner in his popular and influential work on multiple intelligence theory. Gardner has identified eight forms of intelligence -- from the verbal and mathematical (narrow IQ) to the musical, spatial, and interpersonal, as well as the bodily-kinesthetic talents used by athletes. Each intelligence defines a set of abilities that are identifiable and are useful in problem-solving and creativity.

Admission to the club of intelligences doesn't come easily, but Emmons has done the hard work of making the case for SI. First, he identified five core characteristics of spiritual intelligence (while acknowledging that there may be more): People high in SI tend to have the capacity for 1) transcendence, 2) heightened consciousness, 3) endowing everyday activity with a sense of the sacred, 4) using spiritual resources on practical problems and 5) engaging in virtuous behavior (such as forgiveness, gratitude, humility, compassion, and wisdom). Then he marshaled the necessary neurological, developmental, evolutionary, and psychological evidence to show that spirituality fits Gardner's criteria beautifully (for details see Emmons's forthcoming book, The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns: Motivation and Spirituality in Personality, to be published May 1999 by Guildford Press).

You can already feel the rush of new research now let loose. Intrinsically religious people, for instance, seem to cope better with trauma, and to grow from it. Humility -- defined not as low self-esteem but as the disposition to view oneself as basically equal with any other human being -- has been linked to lower cardiovascular risk, better relationships, and exemplary lives.

For Emmons, thinking of spirituality as an intelligence helps to refute those who view religion as inherently irrational. It also emphasizes that spirituality is relevant in everyday life and helps to make understandable the links between health and spirituality. But he warns against falling into what he calls the Nothing But Fallacy: "We're not saying that spirituality is "Nothing But' a way of problem solving."

This kind of work does not defend or attack anyone's specific belief (or revulsion) about accounts such as the biblical Jacob wrestling with the angel. The great religious traditions provide us with tales of people who, like us, have grappled with God, women and men hungry for meaning and a connection with something greater than self, less sleazy than ego. What we have now, out of the new courtship between science and spirit, are practical ways to check out, even measure, our personal ways of knowing not programmed in the doctrine of software, nor apt to be.

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