Now all of this manifests itself down below, but the root of it all lies above. For the measure of all that exists is the governmental order. Initially the Sefirot were laws of government which included in them the production of evil as an actual reality so that afterwards, through its repair, God’s unity would be revealed. Accordingly, the intention in each individual level at the time of the fall, when control was given over to the garments, was to produce evil.
They therefore still lacked the complete perfection that nullifies evil, because the intention was precisely that they should produce evil. And after having produced it, the evil itself was causing their own destruction in the sense that the good powers within them existed only in the mode of negation, powerless to function, while it was the powers of destruction that held sway.