The portal of Copenhagen University. The university's new main building was inaugurated on 13 October 1836, when Jónas was a student there. The eagle above the doorway had been proposed by the theology professor Matthias Hagen Hohlenberg (1797-1845), who also devised the inscription ("It looks at the heavenly light"). He explained that the symbol's significance "lay essentially in the eagle's high flight and acute gaze (which tolerates, indeed ardently seeks, the light of the sun) as a symbol of thought and study." Furthermore the eagle was intended to express the university's relationship to both school and church:

School provides the preliminary formation of natural talent, [which subsequently] at the university goes on to a freer and higher striving, like that of the eagle. The direction of this striving, and its highest aim, is toward the divine, or — like the eagle — toward the celestial light.

The main doorway of the university faces a church, toward which the eagle seems to gaze, and this expresses the relationship "both conceptually and spatially":

Since the church is the earthly manifestation of the divine, and since the university turns its façade (and the eagle its gaze) in that direction, it seemed to me that both the direction itself, and the essential character of the symbol (and of scholarship, too) could be expressed by means of the phrase about "gazing at the heavenly light."

See T. Vögel-Jørgensen, Bevingede Ord, 5th ed. (København: G. E. C. Gads Forlag, 1963), cols. 108-9.

Source: Photo Dick Ringler.