  William's chief aim in his treatment of time and eternity is to emphasize the fundamental differences between eternity and time. He is especially concerned to attack a conception of eternity as existence at every time, a conception he attributes to Aristotle. In his view, eternity in a strict sense is proper to the creator alone and is his very being, though “the name ‘eternity’ says more than his being, namely, the privations of beginning and ending, as well as of flux and change, and this both in act and in potency” (OO I, 685b-686a; Teske 1998a, 109). The fundamental difference between time and eternity is that “as it is proper and essential to time to flow or cease to be, so it is proper and essential to eternity to remain and stand still” (OO I, 683b; Teske 1998a, 102). William, like other medieval thinkers, tends to describe eternity in terms of what it is not. It has nothing that flows and hence no before or after or parts. Its being is whole at once, not because it all exists at one time, but because it all exists with nothing temporally before or after it. William speaks of duration in eternity, but he holds that the term has a different (unfortunately unexplained) sense in this context than when applied to time.