Washing the Face

[richard]

How does Inferno break it?

I think by showing him where it inevitably ends, without any transcendent connection above. It becomes self-referential and about the self. And in some ways (this is my reading of it), that will eventually justify vice - which by definition is short term and self-destructive. A sort of a "dead-end" (as well as spiritually evil, but that would be "invisible", if one already denies the transcendent).