For whom does Augustine write these Confessions? He is surely not informing God of anything God does not already know. Therefore he can only be writing for us: “that I and any of my readers may reflect on the great depth from which we have to cry to you” (26). These “depths” are summed up for Augustine in a key scriptural verse, 1 John 2:16, where lust, ambition, and curiositas1—a distracting interest in created things without reference to their Creator—are diagnosed as a kind