Cyril of Alexandria on the death of Jesus

Upon the suggestion of Shenoute of Atripe on twitter, I returned to Cyril of Alexandria's second letter to Nestorius for help in clarifying thoughts I raised in the last post regarding the divine nature of Christ at Jesus' death. Cyril is most known for his defense of the language of 'Theotokos' (Mother of God) to describe Mary. Nestorius, whose position was condemned, argued for such a split in the natures of Christ that he was only comfortable with attributing the title of 'Christotokos' to Mary. The implication is that Cyril was correct in maintaining the unity of the Person of the Son where the pre-existent Logos was joined to the human flesh in the womb of the Virgin. This distinction would have implications for the death and resurrection of Jesus, too, as you will see below. In what follows, I hear what we might call echoes of Tertullian's beliefs, but the language (at least in the English translation) is a little more crisp:

We assert that this is the way in which he suffered and rose from the dead. It is not that the Logos of God suffered in his own nature, being overcome by stripes or nail-piercing or any of the other injuries; for the divine, since it is incorporeal, is impassible. Since, however, the body that had become his own underwent suffering, he is - once again - said to have suffered these things for our sakes, for the impassible One was within the suffering body. Moreover, we reason in exactly the same way in the case of his dying. God's Logos is by nature immortal and incorruptible and Life and Life-giver, but since, as Paul says, "by the grace of God" his very own body "tasted death on behalf of every person" [Heb. 2.9], he himself is said to have suffered this death which came about on our account. It is not that he actually experienced death as far as anything which touches his [divine] nature is concerned; to think that would be insanity. Rather it is that, as I said earlier, his flesh tasted death.

So it seems to me that Jesus' divinity continued to accompany the body after his death, but death itself did not kill his divinity. Am I seeing it correctly here?