This dissertation addresses barriers that obstruct our ability to recognize the ways in which people with intellectual disabilities know God and retrieves an affective way of knowing in the pneumatology of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous fourteenth-century treatise on contemplative prayer.

There are many stories of ways in which people with intellectual disabilities are excluded from church activities and sacraments on the grounds that they “do not understand”. Embedded in these stories is the implicit theological claim that the ability to understand and accept logical propositions of faith is the only way by which God is known. Even though advances in cognitive neuroscience show that cognition is not exclusively brain-centered, and that bodily, social, and affective processes contribute to knowledge-making, still a model in which propositional logic is central persists. This dissertation claims that the normativity of this model not only distorts our view of people with intellectual disabilities, it limits our perception of how the Holy Spirit conveys knowledge of God.

Within Christian tradition there are strands of an affective theology of the Holy Spirit that offers a non-discursive knowledge of God. The Cloud of Unknowing focuses on human desire and will as instrumental in knowing God rather than rational capacity. The knowledge of God in The Cloud is gained through the Spirit’s transformation of desire. Human desire is also central to mimetic models, critical disability theory, and stigma theory. I propose that an analysis of The Cloud of Unknowing using critical disability theory in conjunction with mimetic models will retrieve an affective way of knowing God through the Spirit’s transformation of desire and affectivity. A retrieval of such affective knowledge can evoke possibilities for engaging with the spirituality of people living with intellectual disabilities as well as addressing the benefits of an affective knowledge of God for all Christians.