Nobody likes to see a bad boy turn good. It destroys your faith in faithlessness. The usual deal with our cultural rebels is that while we sit at home in our armchairs and take no risks, they strut our stuff for us: misbehave, take groupies, drink themselves into stupors, swallow illicit substances and seek naughtiness.

We elect these front-line wild guys to be rebellious in ways we perhaps might be if we were not the wimps we are. So the news that Damien Hirst has given up drink and drugs completely, and that his first one-man show in Britain for a decade is to be devoted overwhelmingly to religious imagery, will send ripples of raw anxiety through the faux-rebel population at large. Oh, no. Not Damien. Not 'the alpha male of British contemporary art', as they call him at the Saatchi Gallery. Not the man who massacres flies by the million and kills killer sharks. Please don't let it be Damien. But it is. Sort of.

I have in my hand as I write - and I think this is an exclusive - a sheaf of poems that Damien
Hirst has produced specially for his new show. That's right. Poems. There are 13 of them. Twelve for each of the apostles and a separate one for Jesus. Each of these poems will accompany a glass box filled with medicinal and symbolic bric-a-brac that seeks also to portray these same 12 apostles and Jesus. 'A trillion dancing spandrels/of light surrounded you,' goes the second of the unexpected poems. 'Slow motion, weightless/ Generous before the blight/soft rotted figs fell from the tree of life.'

When a man starts writing poems about trillions of dancing spandrels of light, and generous figs falling from the tree of life, then his days of rampaging through the Groucho Club high on coke are clearly over and something significant is afoot in his psyche. The glass cabinets, some of which have holes drilled into them at the points where the relevant saints were nailed to the cross, as well as lots of blood, will be fixed to the walls in a dark and gory glazed surround that seeks to set the
tone for Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, as Damien's new show is called.

I think it is safe to conclude that the Age of Uncertainty describes the bad times we are living through, and that Damien himself is on the side of Romance, fragile stuff in our world, as easy to buffet as a butterfly in a gale. 'I remember living in the world of desire/before the age of romance/A love now crushed in the vice-like grip of truth,' he warbles in poem number five. It's not Auden, for sure. But it makes its point atmospherically enough. Things used to be nice. Now they are not.

'Do you believe in God?' I ask him straight out, as we settle down for confessions and explanations in the library of his rambling country residence in Devon. I've been invited to spend the weekend with the corpse meister as he prepares to reveal these dark, new religious conundrums to the public.

'I don't know,' he mumbles back, a tad nervously. 'It's a very complicated word. I mean, you find yourself thinking about death a lot as you get older, and I was starting to think that maybe, when you're older, it becomes the only option or something. Some kind of safety net that you build for yourself. I think it needs revisiting. Let's see, you know. Let's see how the church is getting on. I mean, it's failed so miserably. And they defend it so badly.'

So there you have it. Straight from the shark's mouth. Damien Hirst has sort of found God, and he's sort of making religious art because he sort of feels the church needs him. What we have here, reader, is a wolf who has whipped off his black pelt to reveal the fluffy little baa-lamb hiding beneath.

I have to admit I saw it coming. I have long suspected that the man who saws cows in half and then peeps inquisitively into their expired corpses is himself a big softie inside. My dealings with Damien over the years have divided fairly evenly into encounters with the good Damien and the bad one. The bad one was pretty damn naughty, it has to be said. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who has seen him drop his trousers and insert things into his penis. It was a favourite drinking trick. He'd usually attempt it while staggering about the Groucho Club in the company of that excessively decadent pal of his, Keith Allen, possibly the worst influence on anyone else available in the whole of Britain, and the only star of screen and stage ever to stick his tongue down my throat. It was Keith's horrible way of saying hello. He'd been eating fish.

Those two together were a menace to society on so many psychosocial levels. You may remember them storming up the pop charts a couple of European Championships ago in the unpleasant guise of Fat Les, the manufactured pop moron who put his podgy pop finger on the crude backbeat that activates our nation's football hooligans with a galumphing terrace ditty called Vindaloo. I'm afraid I sang along with it as well.

To my knowledge, Damien Hirst is still the only important British artist ever to appear on
Top of the Pops. Fat Les, sighs Damien, keeps coming back. Like everyone else in the country, he has been on the Atkins diet recently, as part of his spectacular return to healthiness, so he knows what he's talking about when he suggests that Fat Les may be reappearing as Fat Loss.

He looks good. Clean, lean, with a snazzy pair of blue-tinted specs. He's been off toxics since the end of last year and was already sober when his great friend Joe Strummer of the Clash died suddenly of a heart attack a couple of days before Christmas. Joe lived near Damien in Devon. They were close.

When Damien challenges me to a game of snooker in the specially constructed snooker salon attached to his house, and beats me 3-0, with some explosive long-potting, and a few devious little nudges and calls he thought I hadn't spotted, it's the Clash who supply the soundtrack. London Calling blares out again and again from the snooker jukebox.