# David Brainerd — The Varieties of Religious Experience character guide

> David Brainerd in The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** David Brainerd, Brainerd, David

**First appearance:** 0010-lectures-vi-and-vii-the-sick-soul

## Snapshot

The young missionary to the Delaware whose diary of self-laceration and longing became, for James, a pure specimen of religious melancholy and devotion.

## Who they are

Brainerd's journal records a life consumed by longing for holiness and haunted by the sense of his own unworthiness — a man who could neither enjoy the world nor fully possess his God. James cites him as evidence that the most intense religious feeling often arrives through suffering rather than despite it, and that such a temperament, however painful, produces a devotion of unusual purity. His early death and the diary he left behind made him, for generations of evangelicals, the model of a soul wholly given over to invisible things.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_varieties_of_religious_experience_se/characters/david_brainerd
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_varieties_of_religious_experience_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_varieties_of_religious_experience_se/characters