2.3 An apology why in his narration, the writer of these deeds cannot retain their time and order

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I hope that it is very clear (fixum) and always evident (stabile) to the spirit of the readers that which I have often said above, namely that I do not respect the order of time, nor do I avoid any kind of miracle. For therefore they cannot be disturbed by the confusion and mixing of chronology which is perhaps able to be glimpsed when they acknowledge that I do not follow the passage of time but only the truth of occurrences in any time. Nonetheless, I shall have followed the concordance of times and events if I learned them from their reporters both at the same time and in the same order. But since sometimes things which happened at the beginning I learned in the end and things which I learned earlier on, happened later, necessity demanded of me that things be not written in the order that they happened, but according to the time that they were reported to me.

It was for this reason that when describing the good acts of good monks above, that I passed over the deeds of a certain good monk and one of an admirable life. For after having begun this work already many years ago, I –awaiting the time of his death– deferred from writing what I had heard from men trustworthy of faith or from him and what I myself had observed since he was still living in the flesh. Now that he is happily freed from the human affairs and that he, as is fitting to believe, is united with God, to whom one so devout always cleaved, it is the time to write something about him and to communicate to posterity the holy memory of this blessed man.