In the 6th century AD, philosophy was cultivated in Byzantium, marked not only by Aristotelianism but also by Neoplatonism. The latter circulated mainly through the texts of the pseudo-Dionysius, an author whose identity is unknown, perhaps a Syrian monk who pretended to be the real Dionysius the Areopagite, a contemporary of Saint Paul who had converted in the presence of the apostle. The author of the corpus attributed to “Dionysius” consolidated, in the years 480-510 AD, a decisive rapprochement between Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophy. 

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                     The force of these writings had the intensity of testimony from the early years of Christianity, contributing to the inauguration of the so-called negative theology, that exhausted the possibility of the intellect referring to God in a positive way, which indicated the limits of human reason in reaching the divine. Through the mystical path in which he describes union with God regarding agnosia (ignorance) and henosis (union beyond all intellectual apprehension), pseudo-Dionysius opposed Aristotelian metaphysics. After Dionysius, a thinker who preceded the emergence of the falsafa, the center of philosophical activity moved eastward from Byzantium to Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate in the 9th century AD.

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                    It was in an Eastern world dominated mainly by the Byzantine Empire and Persia, which brought together peoples in constant tension, in a scenario of coexistence between Jews, Christians and pagans, of reciprocal influences, of tensions and doctrinal struggles between religious people, of development and uninterrupted sequence of knowledge of the Greek language and philosophy that brought together Platonic, Aristotelian and Neoplatonic theses, that the Arabs, bursting onto the historical scene carrying the banner of a new faith, were confronted with philosophy, with its solutions and its problems that also came to be in the Arabic language.