Calling Evil Good and Good Evil

I purchased a book called The Lamb's Supper (by Scott Hahn) the other day. I bought it because the premise was intriguing: The Eucharist (the Lord's Supper) helps us to understand the book of Revelation (The Apocalypse of St. John). As Revelation is extremely weird, I thought it would be great to read this book by a Roman Catholic scholar. The book has been very good and interesting. I am nearly through its 163 pages. Also, it is interesting to think that, if the Roman Catholic (and Eastern Orthodox) Mass is the major interpretational key to Revelation...then perhaps us Protestants have gotten something very wrong.

I thought it good to share a lengthy quote from the book that will be interesting and informative to all. The passage is about the natural punishment that sin is in and of itself:

"We read on in Romans: "therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves" (Rom 1:24). Wait a minute: God gives them up to their vices? He lets them continue sinning?
"Well, yes, and that is a dreadful manifestation of the wrath of God. We might think that the pleasures of sin are preferable to suffering calamity, but they're not.
"We have to recognize sin as the action that destroys our family bond with God and keeps us from life and freedom. How does that happen?
"We have an obligation, first, to resist temptation. If we fail then and we sin, we have an obligation to repent immediately. If we do not repent, then God lets us have our way: He allows us to experience the natural consequences of our sins, the illicit pleasures. If we still fail to repent - through self-denial and acts of penance - God allows us to continue in sin, thereby forming a habit, a vice, which darkens our intellect and weakens our will.
"Once we are hooked on a sin, our values are turned upside down. Evil becomes our most urgent 'good,' our deepest longing; good stands as an 'evil' because it threatens to keep us from satisfying our illicit desires. At that point, repentance becomes almost impossible, because repentance is, by definition, a turning away from evil and toward the good; but, by now, the sinner has thoroughly redefined both good and evil. Isaiah said of such sinner: 'Woe to those who call evil good and good evil' (Is. 5:20).
"Once we have embraced sin in this way and rejected our covenant with God, only a calamity can save us. Sometimes, the most merciful thing that God can do to a drunk, for example, may be to allow him to wreck his car or be abandoned by his wife - whatever will force him to accept responsibility for his actions.
"What happens, though, when an entire nation has fallen into serious and habitual sin? The same principle is at work. ..."

There are a few things to meditate on here:
1) God's wrath (as all proper wrath) is an expression of love: it is the energy summoned up to rid self or other of evil.
2) Habits
a) Notice how important habits are in this passage. Vice - the habit of doing evil - starts small and then continues on until we are no longer able to control ourselves, but still want to do good (see Romans 7; Aristotle and St. Thomas call this "incontinence"; see next thought). From there, many people who are no longer sure why they should feel bad about their evil deed will be proud of the evil they do...and at that point they have a vice, that is, a genuine bad habit.
b) To help explain the thought above, hare is an explanation of the Vice-Virtue scale:
i)Virtue is having a permanent, fixed habit towards doing what is good. If you are really virtuous, you find doing good easy and are generally not even tempted by evil.
ii) Continence is having a generally fixed will towards what is good...and doing that good most of the time, but not all of the time. Doing good is mostly easy, but temptation is often present.
iii) Incontinence is the partial willing of what is good, but the inability to do it for the most part. In Roman Catholic thought, there are two types of sin: venial and mortal. Venial sin is forgivable in that the person has a will to do what is good, but have not done it (this happens in cases of continence and incontinence). Mortal sin is done from pure vice.
iv) Vice is the habit of doing evil, without care of doing good. Somewhere (whether knowingly or not), a choice has been made to call evil good and good evil. Sins done from vice are not forgivable (they are, thus, "mortal" sins), simply because the person who persists in vice will not ask forgiveness. If something happens in the life of that person where they are "shook up" and turn towards God, then God will, of course, forgive them.
c) Notice also, that as people move from continence to vice, they become less and less wise (Paul says that their minds are darkened).
3) It seems very true that people who act in incontinence or vice need a rude awakening - a cold shower - in order to see things correctly. This has been true in my life (through an act of divine wisdom miraculously breaching my thick skull), in the life of my grandfather (through the fear of dying), and in the life of the Prodigal Son (who suddenly realized that the life of pleasure wasn't nearly as pleasurable as life with his Father).