“With kind and humble intent thou reprovest me, dearest brother, for having wished by…”

With kind and humble intent thou reprovest me, dearest brother, for having wished by hiding myself to fly from the burdens of pastoral care

Gregory I · The Book of Pastoral Rule · NPNF2 XII, Pastoral Rule, Part I

The first sentence of the dedicatory letter, and the reason the book exists. Gregory had tried to avoid consecration in 590; John of Ravenna wrote reproving him for it, and the whole Regula is the reply — the earliest first-person account of the flight that his biographers later turned into a legend of a man carried off in a basket.