BASA

Anselm's debate with Gaunilo 35 much attention to overall unity or development ». 20 But this daim is especially weak for a number of reasons. First, it goes counter to Anselm's assertion that he did impose some order on this work, dealing with issues of two kinds-the more and the less weighty, as we said. Secondly, we know from Anselm's other works that he was not accustomed to let his imperfect writings be transcribed. He complains, for instance, about monks who had prematurely copied and set into circulation earlier drafts of De Incarnatione and the Cur Deus Homo. 21 Since his practice was to release a work only after he was satisfied with it, and since he requested that the Reply be copied together with the Proslogion and On Behalf of the Foot, we may conclude that it was neither something he threw together from notes nor simply a series of notes. Thirdly, he may have been careless about attending to Gaunilo's objections, but it does not follow that he was inattentive to the structure he gave the Reply. If anything, his oversights of Gaunilo's points occurred because he was « too preoccupied » with unfolding more fully his own view– point. On the whole, it seems to me, his reasoning in the Reply does not move haphazardly. Fourthly, extreme care must be exercised in dividing up Anselm's sequences, if this dividing is going to be clone. For example, it is possible without obvious distortion to sepa– rate the first half of Reply 3 from the second half, 22 which begins right after Anselm's ironie comment about finding the lost island and making Gaunilo a present of it. Yet, in doing so, some continuity is lost. For at the end of Reply 2 Anselm is supporting his inference in Proslogion 2 that N must exist in reality as well as in the understanding. He. turns aside for a moment to consider Gaunilo's counterargument with its suggestion that the reasoning of Proslogion 2 is faulty. Then, having dismissed the example by intimating that 20 HICK and McGILL, 9. Cf. Barth's label « eine Notizensammlung ». Karl BARTH, Fides Quaerens Intellectum, ix, n. 1 (English ed., 14, n. 2). 21 De Incarnatione 1 and Cur Deus Homo preface. Note also the one preface for the three dialogues De V eritate, De Libertate Arbitrii, and De Casu Diaboli. 22 See H1cK and McGILL, 25, n. 13. N. B. lt would be a mistake to infer from the fact that the section divisions are not found in the early mss. that the Reply was originally an unordered series of notes loosely strung together. Although Hick and McGill corne to the « series of notes » conclusion, they do not utilize this mistaken inference. See their p. 9.