Augustine: facing the wrong way

And what did it profit me that I could read and understand for myself all the books I could get in the so-called 'liberal arts', when I was actually a worthless slave of wicked lust? I took delight in them, not knowing the real source of what it was in them that was true and certain. For I had my back toward the light, and my face toward the things on which the light falls, so that my face, which looked toward the illuminated things, was not itself illuminated. Whatever was written in any of the fields of rhetoric or logic, geometry, music, or arithmetic, I could understand without any great difficulty and without the instruction of another man. All this you know, O Lord my God, because both quickness in understanding and acuteness in insight are your gifts. Yet for such gifts I made no thank offering to you. Therefore, my abilities served not my profit but rather my loss . . .

St. Augustine, Confessions (9.15.20)